A Kent State editorial: Four dead in Ohio

A half century has passed.

Allison B. Krause and William Knox Schroeder are still 19. Jeffrey Glenn Miller and Sandra Lee Scheuer are still 20.

There have been 50 years of aging for those of us who remember that traumatic day at Kent State.

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young made a song of it: "Tin soldiers and Nixon coming. We're finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming. Four dead in Ohio ..."

Hard to hear a fragment of those lyrics, or even have it pop into your head, and not be transported back to that awful spring.

Yes, we hear the drumming still.

For non-Boomers who know of Kent State only by its mention in a rare news clip, it is impossible to appreciate that tragedy's power.

For those of us alive to hear the news, it became more than a generational benchmark competing with the Kennedy assassination and the moon landing. It marked an irretrievable loss of innocence.

Four dead in Ohio.

Like today, it was an angry time. The country was polarized over the Vietnam War. Was it as polarized as the vitriolic climate now? That's hard to say. There are debates about that. We lived through it, and we don't remember the divisions running quite as deep.

Even so, the divisions were indeed deep. A close second, you might say.

We were young and rowdy and a bit too certain of our own preeminence. Trust no one over 30, most of us warned as a sort of soft drink jingle, now a lot longer than 30 years old.

But despite the divisions, despite the anger, despite the misanthropic arrogance, deep down, we still believed.

We never thought the government would kill us. Willfully kill us.

That's what changed that day.

It was shocking, stunning.

And transformative.

Campuses erupted in outrage. Funerals took place. We never fully grieved. No guardsmen were ever tried.

We still have faith in America's ideals. We work toward that more perfect union. But we recognize more now that the work is needed. We better understand that justice must be pursued, not merely assumed.

We hear the drumming still.

A half century has passed.

Those of us at the cusp of life then have grown to the far edge of it now - our idealism tarnished, our wide eyes narrowed, our step slowed.

The things that day made of us. The things that day took from us.

Allison B. Krause and William Knox Schroeder are still 19. Jeffrey Glenn Miller and Sandra Lee Scheuer are still 20.

They forever will be. They didn't get to age. That day took so much more from them.