There are similarities between the Kent State massacre 54 years ago this May 4 and the nationwide Palestinian protests of 2024, but thankfully no bullets and no funerals. So far.

After the Kent State massacre, which I witnessed as a grad student and dorm counselor May 4, 1970, over 800 colleges and universities went on strike in horror at the killing of four students and wounding of nine other students by the Ohio National Guard, who shot into a crowd of protesting students.

A modest May 1 national antiwar protest exploded into 800 colleges and universities by piggybacking on the national horror three days later of the bloodshed at Kent State May 4.

Academia in America was paralyzed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_strike_of_1970

In the current Palestinian protests of 2024, consider this:

• No students have been shot.
• No National Guard have been called.
• No Nixon has expanded the Vietnam War into Cambodia.
• No university has been evacuated with only two hours for 20,000 students to leave
• No mothers have been interviewed on national TV saying, “If my son had sandals and long hair, he should have been shot too.”

I witnessed all of these occurrences at Kent State in 1970.

https://www.library.kent.edu/special-collections-and-archives/paul-keane-papers

But there is, in 2024, a nationwide student protest propelled by bloodshed just as there was a nationwide student protest propelled by Cambodian and Kent State bloodshed in 1970.

This time the national student movement is over a different kind of military bloodshed than “four dead in Ohio”.

It is the the blood which has been shed by over 30,000 civilian men, women and children in Gaza killed in Israel’s war of self-defense after the terrorist group Hamas murdered 1,200 Israelis on October 7.

30,000 for 1,200. Twenty-five eyes for an eye.

If nationwide protest is a similarity between Kent State 1970 and Palestinian protests of 2024, there’s a big difference too. Adults are earnestly trying not to be knee-jerk suppressors of free speech.

The result is that adults may be fumbling, they may look weak.  There is a lot of commentary on TV calling for “adults to take charge”.

Tents seem to be particularly irritating to those who want order, as if the visual ugliness of tents on the manicured lawns of academia might instantly remind parents that their taxes have destroyed the homes of a million Gazans now forced to live in tents.

If nothing else, students in 2024 have learned the power of symbolism using tents to affect the heart.

I was 25 at Kent State in 1970 and I remember one of the four dead in Ohio, a 19 year old girl named Allison Krause who understood symbolism.

Allison ate her meals in Eastway cafeteria every day where I ate as a dorm counselor in Manchester Hall, so I saw her frequently. On May 3, the last full day of her life, Allison went up to a National Guardsman who was holding his rifle at Kent State.

She put a daisy in the muzzle of his rifle and said “Flowers are better than bullets.”

They still are.

Paul Keane is a retired Vermont English teacher. He graduated M.Ed. from Kent State in 1972. He served as Program Coordinator of the Center for Peaceful Change from 1972 to 1973. Contact him at [email protected].