At the start of Tuesday's episode of The Vietnam War on PBS, the dates covered are flashed on the screen: April 1969 through May 1970. Thus, you know how it will end. So all through the episode, it's as if every scene, every vignette, every interview, every piece of narration serves to explain how this installment will end and why that seminal event happened. It's as if it's being explained, step by step. There is no explicit explanation in the narration; none is needed if you know what happened at Kent State University of May 4, 1970.
But it could not be clearer: A military unit, the Ohio National Guard, killed fellow American civilians, on our own territory, because of countless, repeated, innocent-at-the-time incremental statements, from the president on down, that served to demonize and de-humanize other citizens. Other people no different from you except their view of the war became the enemy. Once they're the enemy, killing them can be morally defensible, or at least rationalized.
For 47 years, it has seemed as if we backed down from that precipice. Yet today, I fear it is happening again.
This time, it's potentially worse, because we demonize one over relatively trivial things, like statues, the national anthem, votes in the Senate, flags, not whether to expand an unjust, unwinnable war on the other side of the earth, and to draft more young men and send them to their deaths. When we turn our fellow citizens who disagree with us into dehumanized faces of evil, when we back politicians who base their actions purely on pandering to the baser instincts of one small faction of voters, we repudiate all we have lost for 200 years and beyond. If you ever have a chance to watch a rebroadcast of this episode, I implore you, as an American or a citizen of any other civilized country, please do.
