Online Journal - http://www.onlinejournal.com
05-03-01: $86,000 for Barbara Bush, but not a penny for Kent State
commemoration
By Bev Conover
May 3, 2001 -- Thirty-one years ago tomorrow, Ohio National Guardsmen
opened fire on a group of students at Kent State University, who were
peaceably demonstrating against the Vietnam War, killing four of them and
wounding nine others, but now the Student Senate Allocation Committee has
sought to obliterate the memory of that terrible day by refusing to fund
this year's commemoration of a defining moment in our nation's history.
Why? Some say it's ideological; that the SSAC has been taken over by right
wing Republicans.
The KSU administration has wanted to put the shootings down the Memory
Hole for years and even went so far as to build a gymnasium over the site
where the students were cut down. Now it has an ally in the SSAC, which
refused to give the May 4th Task Force -- founded in 1975 to commemorate
the events of that terrible day -- $15,000, from it's annual $300,000, for
this year's event. Yet, the SSAC coughed up $86,000 to pay former First
Lady Barbara Bush for her "April 10 campus visit for a day of hobnobbing
with young conservative go-getters, followed by an evening speech in the
2,500-seat MAC Center. Our suspicions were heightened when we noticed that
Babs didn't fill the house; 600 of the $10 tickets went unsold. And
suspicions began to harden into certainty when Bush's speech, justified by
College Republicans as an exercise in political consciousness-raising,
turned out to be a series of "grandkids at Kennebunkport" Family
Circle-style anecdotes interspersed with Lake Wobegonesque tales of the
foibles of her family pastor," the Cleveland Free Times reported.
George W.'s mommy, during an afternoon photo session, showed her skills at
consciousness-raising by excoriating a student senator, because she didn't
like his blond, shoulder-length dreadlocks. According to the Free Times,
she told Ethan Picman, "Thank God you're not my grandson."
The Republican-dominated SSAC has kicked out big bucks in previous years
to bring such "illuminaries" as Robert Dole and Colin Powell to the KSU
campus.
Money or no money, the May 4th Task Force, has determined the
commemoration will be held, because what happened at Kent State that
fateful day was a defining moment for a generation and a lesson for all
generations to come. It was the unthinkable: American troops firing upon,
killing and wounding unarmed fellow Americans. The students' crime? They
opposed the war in Vietnam, and they took their constitutional right of
free speech and the right to peaceably assemble seriously. While the shots
that rang out that day solidified the people's opposition to the war, they
also put student activism into a catatonic state from which it is only now
beginning to awaken.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat May 12 2001 - 19:06:55 EDT