Justice for Our Children

 

Sculptor George Segal and his sculpture in memory of students slain and wounded at Kent State by Ohio National Guardsmen, entitled: In Memory of May 4, 1970: Kent State-Abraham and Isaac.

“Is dissent a crime?”, asked Arthur Krause, the father of 19-year-old Allison Krause, one of the slain KSU students. “Is this such a reason for killing her? Have we come to such a state in this country that a young girl has to be shot because she disagrees deeply with the actions of her government?”

Fifty-one years ago, four Kent State University students were murdered, and nine others wounded by a tsunami of incompetent leadership and bigoted politics. Back then, as today, the people of the USA were wrapped up in a cultural straight jacket of disdain and intolerance for their own youth.

“KSU was in chaos on 4 May 1970, because Ohio Gov. James Rhodes came to campus the day before. In a press conference he unleashed a tirade against the students, calling them “worse than the brown shirts and the communist element and also the nightriders and the vigilantes … They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America, he continued. I think that we’re up against the strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America.”

“Then he stated that he would get a court injunction banning future protests and left the impression that something like martial law had been declared. Then he departed the KSU campus.”

“Rhodes actually did neither. But, the Guardsmen and their officers, the university administration and the student protesters did not know that. Rhodes did accomplish inciting Guardsmen and the general public against the students and muddling the "chain of command" so that no one really knew who was in charge.”

“That night, Sunday, 3 May, students confronted Guardsmen demanding that the Guard leave their campus. Several students taunted the Guard and were bayoneted.”

“The previous Friday, 1 May, KSU students and students at other universities, such as Yale, protested President Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and the expansion of the war in Vietnam.”

Please go here for the whole Kent State Massacre story:

When Demagogues & Incompetence Rule Innocents Die, DownriverUSA, 24 Feb 2017

https://downriverusa.blogspot.com/2017/02/when-demagogues-incompetence-rule.html

Silently Sacrificing our Children, DownriverUSA, 19 Feb 2018

https://downriverusa.blogspot.com/2018/02/silently-sacrificing-our-children.html

Closure, DownriverUSA, 3 May 2020

https://downriverusa.blogspot.com/2020/05/closure.html

Here We Are Again - 50 Years Later, DownriverUSA, 29 May 2020

https://downriverusa.blogspot.com/2020/05/here-we-are-again-50-years-later.html

Why the Kent State Massacre Matters Today

In the Trumpian era of “alternative facts” and demagoguery we are ever slipping and sliding deeper and deeper into our own Fascist-American quicksand where our leaders mislead, confuse issues and make up “facts” to feed their narcissistic addiction and never-sated power and wealth appetite.

Kent State continues to offer lessons for us today… lessons we continue to disregard.

The KSU administration has still not accepted sculptor George Segal’s, In Memory of May 4, 1970: Kent State - Abraham and Isaac. A work of art they commissioned.

Segal’s sculpture is a contemporary version of Abraham and Isaac “in an allegory for the May 4, 1970, tragedy at Kent State University. A poignant visualization of humankind's struggle between ideology and paternal love, it mirrors the conflict that led to the death of four students at the hands of the Ohio National Guard.”

In other words Segal is mirroring our willingness to sacrifice our own children to our gods, whoever or whatever they are. I fear many will continue the practice, still cheerfully following the whims of our past president.

After commissioning it in 1977, Kent State refused the sculpture in 1977, saying that it “depicted violence”.

Violence, indeed. That, after all, is still what we are all about.

In Memory of May 4, 1970: Kent State - Abraham and Isaac is now on display outside of the Princeton University Chapel as part of the John B. Putnam Jr. Memorial Collection, funded by a partial gift of the Mildred Andrews Fund.

Please go here for Paul Keane’s* illuminating and thoughtprovoking words about Segal’s Abraham and Isaac.

*Paul D. Keane, Teacher, M.A. (1972, Kent State University), M.Div. (Divinity School, Yale University) and M.Ed. recently passed. He taught English at Whitcomb High School and Hartford High School, Connecticut.

Humane, Less Costly Alternatives Already Exist

The Trump administration has backtracked on its policy but offered no immediate plan
for reuniting families. Photograph: Guillermo Arias/AFP/Getty Images

It’s been a few days since Mr. Trump signed an executive order which, as he proclaimed, stopped separating immigrant children from parents and imprisoning them in concentration camps.

So what is happening? Nothing.

Yesterday, a federal judge ordered the administration to re-unite the children and parents within the next 30 days. But the administration has no plan for re-uniting the children and reports persist that some desperate parents are agreeing to self-deportation in hope - forced to trust that the Trump administration will return their children.

So, here’s my question:

If you knew that more humane, less costly options existed for America to deal with asylum seekers, than taking kids from their parents or locking them up together, would you use it?

My answer is yes, I would.

Why doesn’t Mr. Trump?

“…there’s an alternative approach that’s cheaper, more humane and incredibly effective. The Trump administration just doesn’t want to use it.”

This Alternative To Detaining Immigrant Families Works. Trump Just Won’t Use It, Elise Foley and Jennifer Bendery, Huffington Post, 22 June 2018.

“The way the Trump administration talks about it, you’d think there are only two ways to respond to families crossing into the U.S. illegally: either separate kids from their parents while the adults are tried as criminals or put entire families into indefinite detention.

But there’s an alternative approach that’s cheaper, more humane and incredibly effective. The Trump administration just doesn’t want to use it.

The Family Case Management Program, which President Donald Trump ended several months after taking office, was meant to keep track of immigrant parents and kids in removal proceedings without having to keep them locked up. It was relatively small ? about 950 families in five locations. But it was hugely successful: More than 99 percent of families in the program showed up for their court dates, and 97 percent participated in required check-ins with their case managers, according to a report from Geo Care, the private prison company that operated the program. And it reportedly cost the government just $36 per family each day, versus $319 per bed per day in a family detention center.”

Please go here for the rest of the story.

Eric Clapton - Tears in Heaven live Crossroads - 2013

Sacrificing Children to Pay for Mr. Trump’s Wall

Six-year-old Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid
was separated from her mother last week
at a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol facility. - ProPublica 

Freedom’s price is high. It respects no national boundary and its fee continues to be paid every day.

Today, babies and children are paying the fee for their parents’ desire to be Americans.

Today and every day into the foreseeable future until Mr. Trump gets the funding for his “Wall”, we, the people of the United States, will permit the Trump administration to separate another 66 kids from their mothers and fathers. They will join some 2,500 already taken from their parents and held in U.S. concentration camps. There is no Trump administration program to restore the children to their parents.

Freedom’s High Price is once again being paid by the innocents… the babies. 

In the United States today: the powerless; the children; the babies are always on the short end of the stick.

The real question is whether the rest of us are willing to surrender our souls and squander our national heritage to let it continue that way.

Listen to children who’ve just been separated from their parents at the border - ProPublica