Kent State killings were in the bigger, bloody criminal context of "corporate whores and their corporate wars."

[ancianita]

We suffered death at scale under Nixon. We've seen criminal presidents before. May this day remind us to never let them in office again.

From the ACLU:

The protests of May 1970, which spread to some 1,300 campuses, erupted after President Nixon escalated the Vietnam War by invading Cambodia. The protests only grew angrier after the Ohio and Mississippi killings. The largest student strike in American history followed, with more than 500 colleges and universities suspending classes, shutting down.

A major issue for college-age youth was that the U.S. government could draft 18 to 20 year olds to fight in the Vietnam War but they could not vote. The Kent State shooting occurred just one year before the ratification of the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.

The student protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s were the first interethnic protest movements in modern America. They were directly influenced by the nonviolent civil rights movement prominently led by Martin Luther King Jr. The diversity in the student protest movement allowed for more open dialogue on conspicuous consumption and America's military-industrial complex, ideas that were previously considered taboo and too subversive for conversation in conservative Eisenhower America.

Conflicts in the youth movement of the early 1970s brought to the forefront of public consciousness the class schism between working class baby boomers who were drafted to fight in Vietnam, and privileged ones who could afford to avoid it by going to college.
Those protests also helped to galvanize new waves in the women's rights and gay rights movements in America in the decades that followed. These movements served as templates for the student organizing that took place generations later in the March for Our Lives movement.

The 58,000 killed in the Vietnam War between 1964 and 1975 far exceeds the hundreds of millennial and Generation Z youth and teachers killed at school massacres that have occurred since 1999: Columbine High in Colorado in 1999 (13 dead), Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut in 2012 (26 dead), and Stoneman Douglas High in 2018 (17 dead).

We should always remember that the student movements and civil unrest that occurred in response to these events and unresponsiveness of the federal government during both eras galvanized young people to action in ways that have improved and continue to improve society.
https://www.aclufl.org/en/news/kent-state-and-its-legacy-national-student-protest

A report that's a few years old but still important.

[randr]

1. I would be willing to bet

The same people who made profit from Vietnam are making a profit today on their weapons

[ancianita]

2. I was 20 then, and they were likely much older. My guess at age 75 is that they're probably dead.

Still, you're right: corporations are structurally pathological, and make their leadership the same such they'll make a buck without care for the human collateral damage, plead stupidity, and rarely if ever be held criminally accountable. Now we've recently found out that it was shortly after those days that EXXON's study on fossil fuel burning's effects on climate was quietly filed away. Then they bought a similar quiet on the political front.

[Voltaire2]

3. Jack and Martin and Bobby and Malcolm and Fred and

all the others I’ve forgotten or who I never knew, all killed. Sometimes by ‘lunatics’ sometimes by police sometimes by we will never really know.

Huge riots in our cities. Military occupations of nonwhite urban regions - that happened.

Meanwhile over in Southeast Asia we were killing at extraordinary levels. We were engaged in an escalating genocidal counter insurgency, having literally taken over the colonial puppet regime from the French who took it back from the Japanese who stole it from the French who ….

It was a lot to grasp.

[ancianita]

4. Absolutely. Well said! Thank you!

Indeed, it was so much to grasp that millions did what many who are traumatized do -- they tried to forget. But we must never forget hard truths of American history and never allow "revision" or erasure of it.

Youth today need to read, remember and preserve that history, and draw a through-line to today, to see how riotous and bloody it can get when corporate and foreign money seek to divide us through messaging wars to overthrow their home government.
Since Biden and some remaining (tough) Boomers lived those days, youth should see that they'd do better to appreciate that he's the adult who steps up to put corporate 'news' drama, and tools of political violence like Trump, in clear perspective. They do well to step up and help Biden drive out the Koch funded trainwreck to future proof democracy's descendants through the next four Democratic cycles of wins.
At least.

[randr]

6. Biden was the youngest Senator ever elected at the time

He still carries that enthusiasm to this day. Time is an illusion.

[randr]

5. Every week end after church

across America, people protested in large and small communities