There's a wonderful diary on the Rec list right now by Arkieboy about his experience at the Kansas City rally for Obama: Life Saving Efforts at KC Obama Rally -Updatedx3.
Arkieboy's wife had an asthma attack at the rally. In the massive crowd, two people sprang into action to help her, first a black Navy vet, then a white Iraq vet combat medic, and they got his wife to an ambulance that was on site. Because those people and that ambulance were there to give her immediate care, his wife’s life was saved. It's a great story about people helping people, and also about a society that works and cares. The detail that caught my attention was the waiting ambulance--was its presence a manifestation of some kind of socialism that Michele Bachmann wants investigated? And I don't remember Sarah Palin mentioning Kansas City in those small town "pro-America areas" of the country she wants to be vice president of. And if this was New Orleans, if there was an ambulance there at all, would it be provided by Blackwater?
It made me think back to a different story about a different ambulance at a different place and time -- Kent State, Ohio, on May 4, 1970.
On May 4, 1970, National Guardsmen opened fire on students at Kent State in Ohio who were protesting Nixon's escalatation of the Vietnam war into Cambodia. 13 seconds, 28 soldiers, 67 shots. 4 students killed, 9 more wounded. An unfortunate tragedy, a damnable accident that just happened. Many blamed student protesters for provoking the guardsmen into shooting.
Unknown to news media at the time, a student had set up a microphone that day on his dorm room windowsill, recording the sounds of the protest below onto his reel-to-reel, and he turned the tape over to the FBI. Later the tape made its way into an archive at Yale, where many years later it was found and copied by Alan Canfora, one of the students who had been wounded that day. That's Canfora with the flag, before he got shot:
In 2007 Canfora reported that audio enhancement of the tape revealed that the National Guard was ORDERED to fire on the students. You can hear it on NPR: "Right here! Get set! Point! Fire!" Kent State was no accident.
On a discussion board regarding the story at WKSU (Kent State radio), one lady posted her own story. She had been on the faculty at the time and was there when the kids were shot. She had seen a National Guard ambulance nearby and ran there for help for the students who were bleeding and still alive. She was turned away because they were only on hand to help troops, and nobody else. "And so the students lay on the ground for 30 minutes with blood flowing from their wounds before any medical help arrived, even though medical help was less than a minute away and standing by doing absolutely nothing."
http://www.wksu.org/...
I was at the May 4 demonstration wearing my faculty observer armband. At the time, I was an assistant professor in the mathematics department. (My name then was Nancy Dykes.) After the students were shot, I remembered having seen a medical truck with a large red cross on the side parked in front of my office building by the Student Union. I ran around the Journalism building to see if medical help was coming, but troops were just standing by looking as though they were guarding the medical truck.
I then ran across the field to the truck and told the officer in charge (I believe it was General Del Corso) that students had been shot and they needed to send over medical help. He told me that they had to keep their medical help there in case their troops were wounded. I pointed to my armband and explained to him that I was a faculty member and that they had to send help because innocent students had been shot by their troops and were laying on the ground bleeding to death.
He told me, "Lady, I don't care who you are, if you don't get out of here, I'll have you arrested."
I then ran back to the wounded students with tears streaming down my face and a complete sense of helplessness.
And so the students lay on the ground for 30 minutes with blood flowing from their wounds before any medical help arrived, even though medical help was less than a minute away and standing by doing absolutely nothing.
Allison Krause, Sandy Schreuer, and William Schroeder might have survived if the National Guard had sent over their medically trained personnel. The National Guard's refusal to give medical aid clearly points to a conspiracy to have students killed. Anyone who had made a judgment of error and accidentally shot a group of students would have immediately tried to minimize the damage by sending over all the medical help that was available.
If the doubting public will not believe the eyewitnesses at the Kent State shooting who saw the officer bring down his arm and they all shot together, please explain to me why the National Guard did not send over any medical help. If you accidentally ran over someone, wouldn't you try to help them survive?
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In the hyperbole today about real Americans, and William Ayers and his terrorist past, I wish people would also hear of this story. Context and reasons are totally missing from today's coverage. If you weren't there, you wouldn't know what America was like then. Just writing this diary I read an account on NPR that gives a world of context that ties SDS, Weathermen, and Black Panther history (all alienated from each other) in with the happenings at Kent State. Even then, I hadn't known all that. I was a kid, a little older than Obama, and I keep thinking now of the seat-of-the-pants ideas I had then about what was going on. My dad had the evening news on during dinner, and LBJ was a joke to me, totally gray and truthless. That was the other side of the story to be played against the explosion of color and music and flower power and protests and styles of the street that filled my world. Ye shall know them by their hair.
And that's the thing. Done in by the Vietnam War, LBJ didn't run for reelection in 1968, and paranoid Nixon, who had presented himself as the peace candidate, must have been the one who ordered the National Guard shootings at Kent State. (I don't know what real American would have ordered the guard ambulance to only help troops.) And by the summer of 1972 LBJ looked like this, as he greeted the new Democratic candidate for president, George McGovern:
Doing what's right isn't the problem. It is knowing what's right. -- LBJ
The story of real Americans is so much bigger than we are being told.
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Thanks also to Two Roads and his diary To Senator Obama, from a Dirty F*ing Hippie, for so many things, including the sepia photos of Kent State.