Just who exactly is a "good" American...?

The anniversary is fast approaching of another peace demonstration in which innocent protestors were shot dead by soldiers poorly trained at crowd control....

The facts are these: On May 4, 1970, Kent State University students rallied to protest President Nixon's decision to expand the Vietnam conflict into Cambodia. Poorly trained Ohio National Guard troops were called to the campus, where, after some mild skirmishing with the students, they fired without warning, killing four and wounding nine. Only one of the casualties had been harassing the Guard; another had been on her way to class when she was shot and killed.

David Kirby's op-ed in today's Christian Science Monitor, goes on to talk about pro-war sentiment--and hypocrisy--during times of national crisis.

A nationwide Gallup telephone poll taken on May 13 and 14 [1970] found that 58 percent of the respondents thought the students responsible for the deaths while only 11 percent blamed the National Guard (31 percent had no opinion).

This antiprotestor sentiment wasn't a momentary aberration, either: Five years later, in a federal civil trial against the guardsmen and the politicians who sent them onto the campus, the jury voted 9 to 3 for the defendants, a decision later reversed on appeal.

[...]

Many of my clients [Kirby was a draft counselor then] hated the war, but just as many thought American boys should answer the call proudly - other American boys, that is. These young men were pro-war, but they didn't relish going to battle themselves...Nowadays, media images and selective memories make it seem as though most people who lived through that time were opposed to the war. Back then, it didn't seem that way at all.

Curiously, recent revelations show that the very architects of the Vietnam war were opposed to it.

In 1995, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara confessed in his memoirs that he had known the war was wrong.

And from Michael Beschloss's "Reaching for Glory: The Secret Lyndon Johnson Tapes, 1964-1965," we learn that, very early in the war, Johnson confessed, "I don't think it's worth fighting for, and I don't think we can get out."

I seriously doubt history will show similar doubt or regret on the parts of Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz and Perle. One of the scariest things about these guys is how absolutely cocksure of themselves they are. Like crusaders throughout history, they genuinely believe "God" is on their side.

Kirby concludes powerfully, in words that could just as well apply to today.

Who was the "good American" in 1970? We may tell ourselves differently now, but the truth is it was someone who thought the cowards with blood on their hands in the White House were swell fellows.

It's easy to blame our political leaders for the things we don't like. But we need to remember that these leaders take their cues from the public that keeps them in office, a public that, in this case, said the war was OK and that anybody who opposed it was wrong. Indeed, anybody who merely attended college on a campus where protests occurred ran the risk of being shot dead walking to class.

(Thanks, Chad, for the heads-up on this...!)