Brian VanDeMark

Yes, and I think another important point to recognize is that by 1970,

What had begun back in the mid-60s as protests against segregation and the Vietnam War had metastasized by 1970 into a much broader, deeper, and more vocal cultural critique of traditional America on the part of many college opponents of the war.

And that was very unattractive in the minds of the more conservative elements on campus and in the town of Kent.

Well, I think that one of the distinguishing features of the student body at Kent State in 1970 is that most of those students were the first members of their families to ever have attended college.

Many of them had blue collar working class backgrounds.

This is more of a blue collar middle class socioeconomic cohort than a middle or upper middle class one.

Many of them were the children of those who had become of age politically during the year of the Depression and the New Deal, who came from fairly strong democratic, capital D, families with the tradition of protest.

They were predisposed to vocalize and articulate their opposition to particular policies.

And when you put that in contrast to a very conservative social composition of the town and the county surrounding the town of Kent and the university, it's a very combustible potential mixture.

Right.

Well, I think it depends largely on location.

For example, if you're talking about the residential population of Berkeley, California or Manhattan, it's a different dynamic.

The residential population of Kent, Ohio was classically Midwestern, classically traditional.

socially quite conservative.

And amidst all of this is a student body that's becoming more and more frustrated, angry, and vocal in their opposition to the war and the American system, which they view as producing this unhappy result in Indochina.

So it's a situation where both sides are going further and further apart.

The capacity to put yourself in the other person's shoes is diminishing to the vanishing point.

The willingness to communicate or give someone else the benefit of the doubt, at least in terms of their intentions, is also rapidly eroding.

And that's going to create a dangerous chasm of breakdown in communication and empathy, which I think is a crucial piece to all of this.

And again, when I say these things, I think about today.