The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 434
Where Everyone Gets a Dose of Puppy Love
PRESENT DAY 55: Murder in Their Hearts
Four days ago was the 54th anniversary of the murder of four students at Kent State University and the wounding of nine others. Besides the students themselves, four of whom never got to live the lives they deserved to live - not to mention Dean Kahler, who was permanently crippled by one of those murderous bullets - a few things ought to be remembered about that day, particularly given that we’ve returned to a climate of hatred thanks to Trump and his fascist MAGA movement. Possibly we never actually exited that climate but for a time it appeared that good was vanquishing bad, compassion vanquishing hate. I say this though I’m well aware of the setbacks during the Reagan / H.W. and Bush / Chaney years. During those Republican administrations we took a step or two back for every two or three we’d taken forward during the Carter, Clinton and Obama years and I am not politicizing this. I’m simply pointing out the fact that the Democrats have given America people of substance who have had a dedication to moving the country toward a more “perfect” union, meaning toward greater equality and justice for all. Carter, Clinton and Obama were all highly accomplished individuals who used the time and power that they had to make the country a better place. On the other hand Republicans have offered up an actor (fronting for the CIA), a sports team owner (fronting for the CIA) and finally a reality t.v. star who simply brought the racist hatred out of the shadows and exposed the strong fascist leanings of at least 30% of the American populace as well as of at least 80% of elected Republican officials. The criminality running through the Republican Party goes back at least to the Joseph McCarthy era (under the last Republican to win the presidential election without cheating, Ike Eisenhower), an era that saw a fascist Congressional committee rip up the Bill of Rights in an anti-communist paranoid frenzy. Hundreds of innocent lives were ruined and deliberately so. Trump, of course, committed treason on live t.v. on Jan. 6, 2012 and committed more crimes during his four years in office than he can easily be indicted for. He’s been indicted for 80 or 90 of them so far but that’s just a drop in the bucket. Before him, Dick Chaney lied to us about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to lead us into two decades long foreign occupations that left hundreds of thousands dead, thousands of Americans dead or wounded and that certainly violated various international laws. Before him, H.W. hired Bill Barr, the same Barr who would later resurface to lie about the Mueller report in order to sabotage the first attempt to get at Trump’s criminal behavior, was hired by H.W. as H.W.’s minions were going to prison for various criminal activities involving Iran, Panama and Nicaragua. H.W. himself would have been jailed had Barr not recommended the criminal pardoning of those who had the goods on him. Before him, of course, Richard Nixon ran another mob operation out of the White House though the crimes of his V.P., Spiro Agnew, appear to have been independent of Nixon’s criminal activity. Agnew was interested simply in money; Nixon was more interested in power and didn’t care which sections of the Constitution he had to violate to get and retain it. Though he’d claimed during the ’68 campaign that he’d end the Vietnam War, Nixon had no such intentions. He was the man the military industrial complex wanted in power because he was the man they trusted to do the bidding they have in their murderous hearts. It was Nixon, after all, who had planned the Bay of Pigs operation to assassinate Fidel Castro and take Cuba back for the mob and American corporate interests. That plan, of course, was foiled by an American public that chose JFK over the obviously creepy though not yet obviously criminal Nixon. Nixon was the man the military industrial complex had in mind all along and they were determined to get their man installed even though it took three assassinations to make that happen - JFK, RFK and MLK, all of whom threatening to end that war and thus the profits of that military industrial complex, the same one Ike had warned us about. Ike was in a position to know, having watched it come into existence during WWII and the immediate aftermath of that war when it became obvious to the war machine that there were no profits like death profits. Hence Korea, Vietnam, Iran / Iraq, Panama, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Iraq (again) and now proxy wars in Ukraine and Palestine, the former in our national interest, the latter against our national interest but it makes no difference to the American war machine. Profit is profit and protesting a war is protesting profit and that they will not abide. In 1970 there was already a healthy anti-Vietnam war sentiment in the United States. That only escalated on April 30, 1970 when Nixon announced that not only was he not going to end the war in Vietnam, he was going to expand it into Cambodia. Students protested across the country by the million. At Kent State someone burned down the ROTC building. Who did that was never disclosed but it wasn’t the hundreds of peaceful student protesters who rallied on the common grounds behind Taylor Hall to demand that Nixon do what he promised he’d do - end the war, not escalate it. But that was not the plan. Ohio Governor James Rhodes declared that the student protesters were worse than Nazis and called in the National Guard.
IMAGES INSERTED: Ohio National Guard on the Kent State Campus
Though there was no violence on the part of the students beyond a few rocks thrown at the guardsmen, these heavily armed soldiers opened fire on unarmed students with murder in their hearts.
IMAGES INSERTED: Ohio National Guard committing murder
How else can you describe the murder of four innocent people who ranged from 100 yards to 300 yards away from the men with the guns? None of them posed any threat whatsoever.
IMAGES INSERTED: Four Dead in Ohio
Allison Krause was 300 yards away when she was fatally hit in the side by a bullet. Jeffrey Miller was 100 yards away when he was hit in the face and instantly killed. Sandy Scheuer and William Schroeder were 200 - 300 yards away when they were murdered in cold blood. These two were not involved in the protests at all but were simply walking to class at 12:30 on a Monday afternoon as were hundreds of others, nine more of whom were also wounded. At the time, most blamed the students. The silent majority in America in 1970 believed in the U.S. government, believed Nixon’s lies and believed that pointing out those lies and the devastation America was inflicting on the Vietnamese people was unpatriotic. Today nothing has changed. We’re now hearing the same sort of hateful rhetoric directed toward the peaceful Palestine protesters that we heard during the Vietnam War. Israel has so far murdered at least 37,000 innocent people, most of them women and children, and in a period of only about six months. Today Israel is threatening to murder and actually are murdering more in southern Gaza. They could not do this without American arms and financial support. Protesting this atrocity is actually the most patriotic thing any American can do. But to the knee-jerk American war machine fascists, any criticism of anything America does is unpatriotic, more so now than ever since Trump turned flag waving into an act of treason on Jan. 6. So what is the takeaway? That the hatred that was always there in America is still there.
IMAGES INSERTED: Booth / Trump; Davis / Trump
The hatred that we thought for a brief moment between 1965 and 2017 was being vanquished is as alive and well as it was in 1865 when white nationalists John Wilkes Booth and Jefferson Davis murdered our greatest president and became heroes across the south and now across parts of the north, midwest and west as well. The military industrial complex murdered Americans in 1970 to keep the war profits flowing and they will do it again in 2024. Joe Biden is powerless to stop it, as powerless as JFK, RFK and MLK were. The American war machine is bigger than the presidency, bigger than the federal government and doesn’t care if you’re American, Palestinian, Israeli, Iraqi, Afghani or anything else. They will kill anyone who gets in their way and they’ve got the support of the brainwashed America First mob behind them, their fans always enflamed by Trump’s hate mongering. Trump is the best thing that ever happened to the “deep state.” That’s what should worry us most about the election this November. If the American war machine wants Trump, then it’s Trump they shall have. Indictments, convictions, prison terms, treason notwithstanding.
Note: Within three months of the Kent State murders, Ohio reached #14 on the Billboard chart. It’s a bitter reminder.
AUDIO INSERTED: Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Ohio
(Once again I insert this track without permission and will take it down upon request.)
IMAGES INSERTED: Record Labels / Sleeves / Promo