To Peacefully Petition

“You don’t go on bended-knee to petition the official culture for your rights. You have to take them.” ― Terence McKenna

In a matter of days, 54 years will have passed since the National Guard shootings of unarmed students at Kent State University in Ohio. They had peacefully assembled on their campus to protest the War in Vietnam and its expansion into Cambodia. In just 13 seconds, though, guardsmen fired 67 rounds that killed four students and injured nine, including one who was permanently paralyzed. The soldiers were all of the same approximate age as the students and eight of them later were charged with depriving the protestors of their civil rights. A judge acquitted the shooters, but what happened on the Kent State campus that day changed the politics surrounding the draft and the war in Southeast Asia.

Every generation of American youth since 1900 has confronted a war, and they are currently dealing with one not of our country’s immediate making. Unflinching, unilateral support, though, financially and politically, for Israel’s assault on Gaza, has left college campuses, especially in this country, restive. Israel has managed to be more horrific than Hamas terrorists during their October 7 attack, and the videos and imagery leaking from Gaza via social media have added an emotional overlay to geopolitics sustaining the war, though it looks more like genocide and a complete razing of infrastructure than any type of combat. The extent of devastation is almost beyond comprehension.

More than half of Gaza’s surviving population, one million people, is now homeless, and 77,000 of them are living with wounds caused by the Israeli invasion. Seventy percent of the wounded and the 34,000 killed are reported to be women and children, living in the streets because 221,000 housing units have been destroyed. An average of 88 children a day have been killed in the six months of attacks. A total of 26 hospitals are out of service and more than 400 health care workers have been killed, which may partially account for a recent mass grave discovered at a hospital site. When the White House said it wanted the discovery investigated, an IDF spokesman responded with, “Investigate what?” Meanwhile, all 12 of Gaza’s universities have been destroyed along with 56 schools, and 625,000 students are displaced without educational resources. Israel’s president, Bibi Netanyahu, labels American complaints about these statistics as “anti-semitism.”

Protesting the slaughter of innocents as casualties of war is not antisemitic just as marching in the streets against the Vietnam War was not anti-American. When a student rally to support Palestinians was organized for the University of Texas campus, the state’s governor had troopers from the Department of Public Safety immediately dispatched to break up the gathering, although there had been no apparent violations of the law or violence by anyone present. The governor, however, had more than 100 DPS officers at the ready to move in with riot gear and disrupt the student assembly. These are the same officers, who, under Abbott’s control, were unable to raise a gun against a mass murderer at a public school in Uvalde. UT reportedly has about $50 million invested in arms manufacturers and pressuring the administration to divest was a central cause of the protest.

In the video above, a TV news photographer from FOX7 News in Austin is dragged to the ground by officers and ordered to lay down. He seemed to be only doing his job by moving with the crowd and recording student and law enforcement interactions. The photographer, along with dozens of students, was arrested, though charges seemed vague and unsubstantiated. The Travis County prosecutor said the DPS lacked probable cause in the arrests and all 57 cases were dismissed even as the governor has characterized the students as criminals who belong in jail. DPS has indicated it plans to pursue a criminal investigation against the TV photographer because it believes he hit a trooper with his camera, an absurd notion, on its face.

The governor held a news conference the next day in Dallas to say he is going to be advocating for new laws that turn participation in “riots” and acts of violence into felonies, which is likely to give law enforcement great discretion in deciding what exactly comprises a riot. Like most radical right conservatives, the Texas governor conflates resistance to war and genocide with antisemitism, which politically characterizes citizens as criminals and racists simply for exercising their right to peacefully assemble and petition their government.

The Texas governor’s tactics are a common element of fascism. Using law enforcement in riot gear or soldiers is an effective method for suppressing and intimidating dissenting voices. It can also be a catalyst for political backlash against the governing institutions and their policies. If most of the Texas National Guard were not already deployed to a stretch of the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass, he likely would have sent those troops as an exercise in asserting power, which is what Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes did at Kent State. Just as college students today are trying to execute a nationwide strike and protest over Gaza’s treatment, a similar one had been called for by activist groups after President Nixon announced the U.S. invasion of Cambodia to expand the War in Vietnam. Students believed the soldiers arriving at Kent State were armed with blanks but live bullets were fired the next day on May 4, 1970.

My friend, and also a frequent Big Bend habitué, John Filo, was a student photographer that morning when young people scrambled for cover as their government began firing into their midst for protesting an expansion of a wasteful war. John was a senior and without a specific assignment that day but was wandering campus with his camera when he heard shots. He still thought the gunfire was the sound of blanks until he saw a 14-year-old runaway, Mary Vecchio, kneeling and screaming over a young man’s body. Pointing his camera and snapping a photo, Filo took what has become a singular, iconic picture of the Vietnam Era protest movement. He won a Pulitzer for photography at the age of twenty-one.

“I dropped my camera in the realization that it was live ammunition,” he told CNN in an interview a few decades ago. ”I don't know what gave me the combination of innocence and stupidity, but I never took cover. I was the only one standing at the hillside. After I did that self-check and turned slowly to my left, what caught my eye on the street was the body of Jeffrey Miller and the volume of blood that was flowing from his body was as if someone tipped over a bucket. I started to flee-run down the hill and stopped myself. ‘Where are you going?’ I said to myself, ‘This is why you are here!’"

The tragedy of Kent State coalesced the anti-war movement and prompted May Day Marches in Washington, D.C. Although U.S. troops are not presently involved on the ground in Gaza, our government’s continuous military and financial aid to Israel make this nation culpable, an unacceptable reality for millions of Americans, not just college students. The brutal crackdowns on campuses here appear hardly different than those often criticized by this country’s government when they occur in China or Iran or Russia. The University of Texas said it was concerned about the possibility of anti-semitic behavior. Too many Texans, though, are more worried about fascistic behavior by the current administration of the governor and lieutenant governor. Regardless of characterizations to the contrary, there were no indications of any pro-Hamas messaging in the crowd. Nothing had been done to justify such a dramatic overreaction by the DPS but the governor seemed to want to make an example out of Austin, which he has referred to previously as “the people’s republic of Austin,” vilifying the city for its historic liberal politics.

“These protesters belong in jail,” he tweeted. “Antisemitism will not be tolerated in Texas. Period. Students joining in hate-filled, antisemitic protests at any public college or university in Texas should be expelled.”

That is not what happened, and he knows it.

The current campus movement is driven by considerably different dynamics than those that prompted the protest marches against the Vietnam War. Young Americans are not being drafted into combat nor are any coming home in coffins draped with flags. Social media, however, brought the suffering of Palestinians into the living and dormitory rooms of this country in a manner that not even color film did for Vietnam, which became America’s first “living room war.” The U.S. is, historically, parochial and foreign politics seemingly have little impact until they are sufficiently dramatic to get our attention. The Israeli genocide, which is the definition given to the assault by international human rights groups and numerous diplomats, is, finally, beginning to affect American politics. I remain convinced, however, that Israel could drill a hole to the center of the earth, detonate a bomb that blew the planet in half, and there would be politicians of this country spinning off into space yelling their last words, “Israel has right to defend itself.”

The protest movement of the early 70s might have fizzled had there not been an overreaction at Kent State. The subsequent May Day Marches on Washington began to turn national politics away from support for the war after a few hundred thousand people took to Pennsylvania Avenue to get the president’s attention. One year I hitchhiked out from Michigan and another spring we squeezed five of us into a friend’s old coupe and went out across the Pennsylvania Turnpike and down into D.C. We camped out in Potomac Park and there were thousands of tents and trucks and people with fire pits and loudspeakers. The scene felt more like a rock concert than an important and historic political moment.      

I remember in great detail a conversation with a girl who had stopped by our campsite on her way to the concert at the Washington Monument held the night before the march. I wrote about her in a journal I occasionally kept to improve my writing during those years. She was already a bit drunk when she arrived and said she had been smoking weed most of the day. Drinking deeply from a bottle of cheap wine, she sounded like we had just entered a conversation already in progress that had been going on privately in her head.

“But I don’t give a shit, ya know?” she said. “They killed my fucking big brother for no reason. Just because of their communism paranoia. I hate Nixon. I hate his fucking war.”

“Jesus,” I said. “I’m sorry. That’s pretty awful.”

“Yeah, well, I’m staying stoned and fucked up until he comes home.”

“But I thought you said he was.......”

“Doesn’t matter. Long as I’m messed up, I can convince myself he’s coming home. My dad won’t talk, and my mom has Donny’s picture on the counter in the kitchen and she talks to him all day long like he’s there. We’re all fucked up.”

“I’m sorry. Don’t know what to say.”

“Nothing to say. I came up here from Georgia to feel like I’m doing something, you know, just being here in the street, being a number.”

“Yeah, seems like the only thing we can do, I suppose. Not sure how it makes a difference. Doesn’t look like anything more than another concert with a big stoned crowd.”

“Yeah, but they’ll notice us, and we’ll be on the news and tomorrow we’ll shut down Pennsylvania Avenue and that motherfucker president will know how many people hate him.”

“I think he should know by now.”

The sadness she carried was probably constant in every moment of her life and everyone around her suffered because that was what she intended. She was pretty with big round eyes and narrow, square shoulders but her darkness was visible even in the sunlight. Multiply her agony by the tens of thousands and you get the suffering of the Palestinians and the Israelis. Every war is the same.

Until it becomes genocide.