The Girl in the Kent State Photo
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
And yet, she eventually defied the narrative that was written for her. She built a new life on her own terms. Far from the public glare that defined her as someone she never was, she’s now who she wants to be: someone whose life is both private and purposeful.
It is, at least to some degree, a piece about issues alive today and amplified by the internet, social media, a larger world population, faster modes of transit, etc. The world has grown both larger and smaller at the same time and it will be some future generation that perhaps figures out how to deal with all this, while perhaps being caught flat-footed by their own current developments.
"Back in Opa-locka, Mary Ann couldn't go to Royal Castle for a burger without reporters and hecklers following her. Death threats filled the Vecchio family mailbox. "It's too bad it wasn't you that was shot." "What you need is a good beating until you bleed red." "I hope you enjoyed sleeping with all those Negroes and dope fiends." "The deaths of the Kent State four lies on the conscience of yourself."
When I read things like this I wonder: what the fuck is wrong with people that they are so vicious and lacking the smallest shred of empathy for a mere child who did nothing to deserve any of this, nor for the victims of a mass murder by people who's duty it was to protect them?
America has a non-negligible percent of population who I can only describe as "bloodthirsty for no good reason". They've been here a long time, and remain here today. When we try to discuss the problem, the noise from political side-taking usually overtakes the conversation.
I think a lot of the divisiveness is a result of the same effect. It's easy to dismiss other people's perspective and think they are 'just stupid or malicious' when you don't know them. We need to get back to assuming the people that disagree with us are potentially as smart as we are, but with different values or information.
But as a POC, I point out that America has a long tradition of taking children to witness lynchings, and the children would cheer. Or to beat foxes to death with sticks.
I don't think it’s as simple as “people don’t have emppathy when death is abstract and indirect.” Lots of people don’t have empathy when they’re socially conditioned to believe a certain type of person is a subhuman.
Today, we have police suffocating citizens and murdering adolescents, and there’s a certain type of person who cheers this, provided the victims are member sof a class deemed “subhuman."
I do not believe for a moment that witnessing the murders would change their minds, because even as video circulates showing the murder happening, they continue to cheer.
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I also don’t think we can conflate this with arguments about “people you disagree with.” We’re not talking about people sitting down and debating free love or long hair.
We’re talking about people who believe that other people are literally a disease infecting society that should be exterminated as quickly as possible, preferably in such a way that it sends a message to others.
If we were sitting side-by-side in the Warsaw Ghetto, I might agree with you intellectually, but nevertheless my immediate concern would be for the localized cruelty.
I very much disagree that pointing out a particularly virulent strain of cruelty is motivated by the desire to hope that the problem can be solved permanently.
When you’re one of the people with a target on your back, your immediate concern is with the cruelty you are threatened with and/or experiencing.
Under those circumstances, your motivation is to “think globally, but act locally.”
It would be the same dynamic if, for example, I was a woman experiencing misogyny on some social media site. True, misogyny is in a lot of places and has been present for a very long time.
But nevertheless, my immediate concern would be reducing it in the place where I’m experiencing it. If I called someone out for their behaviour, would I accept “Well, lots of people are misogynists, always have been, always will be, so why are you pointing at me” as an answer?
I think not.
The more abstract you make a thing, the harder it is to alleviate your suffering from a thing. Which is exactly why people who don’t want to fix a problem always try to make it as abstract and general as possible.
so you're right and I hope you don't let the wilfully ignorant discourage you.
This is certainly true, but it's also the case that history, culture and ideology influence the behaviours of geographically-close groups of people over the medium-long term.
I'm optimistic that it will decrease over time, because frankly it has been, if you look at history. I mean, I remember reading up on the "bog bodies" and they figured out that pretty much the whole lot of them died quite brutal deaths.
I'd like to think as a culture we're not so much like that anymore, but it certainly persists in certain ways and places.
Some people reading this might think I am exaggerating, but if you hear my father in law rant about democrats you would be shocked.
Minorities are by and large generally more culturally conservative than the majority of the West. The only difference is the approach to communalism versus individualism, but the American conservative affinity towards individualism is largely a classical liberal idea. Minority communities are not blind to that, several aspects of progressive politics are incompatible and the media hasn't changed their mind. For instance, the gay and black community is very splintered, and progressives have been able to manage that. Left-wing literature and academia acknowledge this as well. Add influences of the Vietnam War, and you will get a vastly conservative community.
However, party politics in America do not subscribe to a consistent frame of ideologies. As cultures began compounding over the past 60 years, identity is the mainstream approach for appealing to bases. The parties have chosen a side.
A majority of minority voters have weighed the cost-benefits of choosing between their conservative principles or a stronger representation of their people, and found one side more accommodating. Quite literally, the biggest downfall to the advancement of conservative ideals in America is probably one specific party's refusal to appeal towards minority communities. It was true before Trump, Trump only exposed this reality of the Republican base. There could have been a conservative revolution.
One final point. Asians has had to deal with issues of systemic and structural discrimination from both sides of the aisle. The issues go far broader than higher standards of university admission. Very little to do with their affinity towards specific ideologies.
>I do not believe for a moment that witnessing the murders would change their minds, because even as video circulates showing the murder happening, they continue to cheer.
Social conditioning is a way to reinforce the abstraction over the reality though. I come from a right wing family and have seen it several times, not to mention how often it's reflected in memes criticizing the right: they change their minds when it happens to them. Cheney and his gay daughter is a prime example. Being part of a mob and watching another part do something bad to still another (perceived) mob feels more like theater than reality.
>I also don’t think we can conflate this with arguments about “people you disagree with.” We’re not talking about people sitting down and debating free love or long hair.
It's not conflating, it's reality. Those people can vote. They go to work. They are cops. They are doctors. They are school teachers. If you choose not to engage them as thinking people, how do you plan to change their minds? If you don't plan to change their minds, then what's the plan?
>We’re talking about people who believe that other people are literally a disease infecting society that should be exterminated as quickly as possible, preferably in such a way that it sends a message to others.
Are we? Knowing tons of very right wing people, I don't really see anyone happy about the kinds of deaths you're referring to. I see people defending police, giving them (perhaps too much) benefit of the doubt, and at times ignoring wrong doing, but that's a long way from a lynch mob. Not to say it's in good taste, but I think you're stretching a lack of sympathy, or perhaps willful ignorance at the extreme, to be the same as hate. From my perspective some people are just more concerned with law and order than fairness, and it's because they aren't on the losing end, not because they're malicious.
Maybe this has a tendency to happen in larger group-think situations. Those bloodthirsty individuals weren't at Kent State, they didn't experience any of this first hand, but they were part of a group that was, on some level, afraid of the students, and hated what they represented. They lashed out based on group-think.
I blame the scale of our politics for this. The federal government should not be able to start a war without a referendum and a super-majority. Instead of real democracy and "power to the people" everything is becoming a federal issue, covered by a couple dozen national media companies, with everyone in a country of 330 million people lining up behind a thousand career politicians and talking heads, funded by the rich and multinational corporations. So much group-think. No less in the 1960s, I assume.
Everyone may then be shocked when someone actually goes and does it, but it seems to me like a predictable result of dehumanizing your rivals rather than just what naturally happens when smart people with different values and information disagree with each other.
Genocide, slavery, civil war, imperial conquest, overthrowing democracies in favor of repressive regimes, to today’s bombing of people in other countries with drones. We don’t discuss these things because they’re painful, conflict with the narrative of ourselves we’ve been told, and are drowned out in modern media because both “sides” agree with the policies.
America is bloodthirsty because we always have been, and have taken no meaningful steps to change it.
Another book is 'How to Hide an Empire' by Daniel Immerwahr.
To play the other half of this argument: America engaged in slavery, but also fought its bloodiest war to end it, played a major role in ending the Holocaust and freeing Europe from the Nazis, ended Japan's conquest of Asia, freed South Korea, and brought about through hyperpower probably the longest peace between major powers in millennia, among other notable counterpoints.
It's almost as if the world isn't black and white.
America and everyone else will continue doing both wonderful and terrible things, but we'll keep discussing only the half of those things we disapprove of, especially if it feels like it's helping us win an argument.
Hand-wringing over the past doesn't make tomorrow better, it's a distraction from doing things that will.
To be clear, basically the whole of human history is misery and privation, and only in this era of long peace under the aegis of American hyperpower have we witnessed a glimpse of lasting peace and prosperity.
So, no one will disagree that great wrongs have been wrought, but it seems intellectually dishonest to overlook the staggering good.
It was only “its bloodiest war” because a sizable fraction of the country was fighting to protect slavery. Much of the rest of the world that had chattel slavery ended it without similarly bloody wars—and generally sooner. The fierce defense of chattel slavery in the US that produced its bloodiest war isn’t a positive.
But they didn't do that. They laid down their lives instead.
Like I said before, picking out only the things we dislike and overlooking positives isn't productive or honest to ourselves.
Only later did they free the slaves, and as an act of war more than freedom.
I don't think their primary motivation was preservation of the Union, I think it was abolition.
Let's not pretend preservation of the Union was the only major factor, or that abolition was entirely a back-burner concept, it had been building steam and popular support for decades.
Sure, preserving the Union may have been the main concern on a realpolitik level early on, but that doesn't change the fact that abolition was the writing on the wall and had been for decades.
No, because that’s what the Union said—that preserving the Union was more important than abolition. The South declared secession and attacked federal facilities anyway.
The South’s overweaning fear of the distant future possibility of abolition backfired and accelerated it.
We did some noble things in the 1940s for sure. Since then, what would you say has been “staggering good”?
History is told by the victors, but that doesn’t make their actions just.
> Justice: The world may be a difficult place to live, but it is basically just; people usually get what they deserve. The difficulties in one's life serve as a test to sort the deserving from the undeserving.
Oklahoma:
A motor vehicle operator who unintentionally causes injury or death to an individual shall not be criminally or civilly liable for the injury or death, if:
1. The injury or death of the individual occurred while the motor vehicle operator was fleeing from a riot, as defined in Section 1311 of Title 21 of the Oklahoma Statutes, under a reasonable belief that fleeing was necessary to protect the motor vehicle operator from serious injury or death; and
2. The motor vehicle operator exercised due care at the time of the death or injury.
* http://webserver1.lsb.state.ok.us/cf_pdf/2021-22%20ENR/hB/HB...
Florida:
870.07 Affirmative defense in civil action; party convicted of riot. (1) In a civil action for damages for personal injury, wrongful death, or property damage, it is an affirmative defense that such action arose from an injury or damage sustained by a participant acting in furtherance of a riot. The affirmative defense authorized by this section shall be established by evidence that the participant has been convicted of a riot or an aggravated riot prohibited under s. 870.01, or by proof of the commission of such crime by a preponderance of the evidence.
* https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2021/1/BillText/er/PDF
If you are trying to flee for your (perceived?) safety during a "riot", then it seems to be treated as a form of self defence (?).
From:
I don't live in a world where killing 4 students simply for standing around while a protest was going on to be just, even factoring in property damage, but you do you
It's possible to describe/explain something without condoning it.
There's more to unpack here (such as anonymity being somehow an enabler of aggression) but hey... Let's arm everyone and see what happens!
I've no interest in a debate on religion, but Christianity is the religion that brought "bad people burn in hell for eternity".
If the answer to the first question isn't yes, can you still go to hell with god's forgiveness?
My opinion, fwiw: I think people really want to believe that collective punishment works, but it really doesn't. People on the right who were excited about the violence at the time wanted the deaths to teach the vandals a lesson. People on the left chanting "shoot him with his own gun" wanted to teach sadists within law enforcement a lesson. But this woman's first exposure to Vietnam war politics was this specific protest, so how is shooting a student in front of her supposed to prevent vandalism? Maybe the violence was born out of impotent rage? Everybody had people on the other side they disagreed with and no way to reach them or change their mind.
"Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." — Geo. Orwell, 1984
To save others a click:
In 1970, an image of a dead protester immediately became iconic. But what happened to the 14-year-old kneeling next to him?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
I've known the photo for decades, but I did not know the woman in front of the body was only 14, and I knew nothing of her life before or after the shootings. The photo was always a frozen moment for me.
Neil Young's song Ohio (with the famous refrain “four dead in Ohio”) is about that day.
Also, try: