August 17, 1977

Let Scholarships Be Kent State Memorial

Since when have we started building monuments to defeat?

A handful of left-over protesters from the late sixties has set us off in this novel direction by halting a multi-million dollar construction project and demanding the campus of Kent State University be set aside as a "national historical site."

Supposedly the intent is to enshrine the memory of four young people killed there by National Guardsmen during an anti-war demonstration seven years ago.

Yet, a granite tombstone-like marker with their names stands in the parking-lot landscape circle where the rioters fell.  Neither the marker nor the lot would be disturbed by a large addition to the gymnasium now under construction.

The building would occupy a slope of land now romanticized as "Blanket Hill" where defiant students camped to taunt firemen, police and guardsmen.  Also included in the area to be hallowed is the playing field where protesters organized their mass marches.

Thus we discover the real goal of the current crop of demonstrators is to legitimatize sorry history - to establish the premise that surrender is noble.

To buy this claptrap is to defile the memory of the thousands who died while doing their duty to their nation.  Before we rush to sentiment for four, we should reflect on the sacrifice of thousands.

It is difficult to put the Vietnam War into perspective because it was, for the United States, our only moral war - with the possible exception of World War I.  One man's morality too often is another man's sin.

Five presidents involved us ever deeper into the Indochina morass for no other reason than to try and preserve liberty for a weak and poor people.

We may ask ourselves now, as we did in the sixties, whether our self-interest justified the lives and treasure committed to the cause of freedom.  We cannot be sure that the specific luxury of liberty in America is affected by the general health of liberty elsewhere.

However, it was craven of us to abandon our friends to whom we had given sacred pledges of assistance.  The tyranny we knew would come as we gave up has now engulfed one more precious enclave of personal liberty.  And our unique civilization is the smaller because of it.

Vietnam and Cambodia, the focus of the Kent State hypocrisy, are now being systematically butchered into oblivion.  Millions of Orientals who tried to emulate American freedom have been, and still are being, slaughtered inhumanely.  The carnage is greater than Hitler's infamous gas chambers.

Where, now, are the voices of morality which shouted us into immoral defeat?

Incredibly, the trustees of Kent State University have been intimidated by less than a hundred radicals out of a student body of 24,000.  For more than a month now authorities, including a Federal judge in Cleveland, have attempted to placate the so-called May 4 Coalition as if it had some right to dictate terms.

The trustees, under prodding of the judge, finally agreed to move the new gym a hundred yards farther away from Blanket Hill if the Ohio Legislature would appropriate $1.7 million of taxpayers' money for the extra costs involved.

No dice, said the Coalition.  The gym must not be built.  The area must remain exactly as it was at one dramatic moment in the past.  The Federal government must appropriate $6 million of taxpayer's money to purchase the property as a memorial.  No compromise.

There certainly can be no compromise that involves spending tax money.  The citizens of the city of Kent are circulating a petition urging university officials to proceed with building.  The use of tax money to appease a radical few would draw a rash of taxpayers' suits to prevent it.

And for good reason.

After the four students were canonized, there would have to be an historical dedication of the ROTC building that replaced the one burned down by the rioters.  Then the U.S. Department of the Interior would have to purchase the downtown Kent stores vandalized and looted by the university demonstrators.  Finally, the fire hose cut to prevent Kent firemen from dousing burning buildings set afire by teenage moralists would have to be exhibited in a local museum.

Of course, some of the costs of preserving dubious history could be recovered by admission tickets, but I suspect there aren't enough people interested in the event to make it a paying proposition.

If the Coalition and the trustees are really serious about finding some meaning in an act of two-sided folly, let them set up four scholarships in international studies as living monuments to the ideal of peace both students and guardsmen sought to achieve.

Then, let us all leave to future historians the task of determining the significance of the unhappy events of May 4, 1970.

Author: Lindsey Williams