> I'm sure if you took the people that hung that banner and made them hold hand with one of the students as they died, their enthusiasm would quickly fade.

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.