Reply #45: Thanks, VickiTulsa for this

[kainah]

When I called home that afternoon, I was a wreck. I was so distraught and when I told my mother what had happened, she said, "Well, they must have deserved it." I had been organizing demonstrations at my college and all I could think was that she thought it would be OK to kill me too. It took us years for us to get beyond that. Several years later, when I was knee-deep in the first few years of the research, she asked me if there was something she could read to better understand what happened. I recommended Peter Davies's The Truth About Kent State. She read it and then told me she was sorry she'd said what she said but you can't take something like that back and, obviously, I've never forgotten.

As for the protests after the killings, especially in the immediate aftermath (as with your example of Colby College), there was a huge paroxysm of response. But when kids came back to college in the fall of 1970, most were much more cautious than they had been the year before. And, of course, who could blame them? We all saw what we were risking. And, of course, that what the point, I believe.