Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young recorded “Ohio” on May 21, 1970, recounting the shootings at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, concurrent with those at Jackson State University on May 15, 1970:
“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio
“Gotta get down to it.
Soldiers are cutting us down.
Should have been done long ago
What if you knew her and
found her dead on the ground?
How can you run when you know?”
(A previous student massacre occurred at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg, South Carolina on February 8, 1968.)
Sending troops to quell domestic disturbances is disproportionate. (Police and the National Guard are poised to maintain law and order domestically.) The results are unlikely to be as expected.
Please indulge me: After a long string of sporting dogs used by my father for bird hunting, my siblings and I gifted a companion dog to our parents after we were grown. She was the cutest canine ever but, unlike previous puppies, she came into a household with no older dog from which to learn. Not appreciating our awareness of pets’ interactions with humans, she attempted endless manipulation before crossing a line after which nothing was accomplished:
The failure to understand that a course of conduct has been seen and is known finds analogy in contemporaneous, ill-fated confrontations:
The American people have no appetite for the powers that be treating their fellow Americans as pariahs — strangers in a strange land (to borrow from Robert Heinlein and Leon Russell).
Those responsible demonstrate delusion akin to that blinding the Johnson Administration in Vietnam: The Beatles had a hit single simultaneously concluding
“Money can’t buy me love
Can’t buy me love, love
Can’t buy me love”
and money cannot buy military success.
A nursery rhyme learned while I was living in Belhaven until five years old makes the point succinctly:
“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.”
Money and troops can accomplish nothing beyond creating acrimony and divisiveness when the dynamics and chemistry are unpropitious for military intervention.
The United States devoted untold amounts of money and military power in pursuit of victory in Vietnam, but too much would never be enough. Such is the case in the streets of America.
Mississippi has witnessed murders and lynchings. Police have opened fire on civilians across the nation, over time. History does not judge those responsible favorably.
The American people are not mean. They never have been and never will be. They will not countenance the maiming and murder of civilians on city streets, especially unarmed individuals acting nonviolently. That is “a bridge too far.”
Civil cohesion — peace in our midst — is sought. Confronting peaceful protestors and jailing them will encourage others to register disapproval, as witnessed throughout modern history across the world.
The Freedom Rides ended in Jackson. The Freedom Riders were promptly convicted and sent to the Parchman Farm. Others took their place on interstate buses, creating a paradigm for Civil Rights activists and subsequent dissenters.
Logic in the West Wing and the Cabinet Room in a disconnect might suggest that directing money and military power to subdue unarmed civilians has but one outcome. President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara — as in University of Mississippi quarterback Jim Weatherly’s magnum opus —
“… found out the hard way
That dreams don’t always come true”
Since this column is replete with quotations, one more will not matter:
“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive”
The words from Sir Walter Scott’s “Marmion: A Tangled Tale of Flodden Field” likely define the contemporary world in the fullness of time. What proved true over millennia is as prescient as ever.
Jay Wiener is a Northsider
