Keep the Faith, Baby: Maintaining Hope Against All Reason

Kent State May 4, 1970

I recently read an excellent book about the Kent State Massacre (Kent State an American Tragedy by Brian VanDerMark) in which four people were killed and eleven injured by National Guardsmen during an anti-war protest on May 4, 1970. I knew the basic outline of the story and some of the details. Still I learned a lot from the book. What I found shocking was that in the aftermath of the deaths of these innocent young people their families received hate mail. Just so we’re clear, the parents of college students who were shot and killed during a protest were mailed letters expressing pleasure that their child had died, blaming them for the way their child turned out and wishing more had been killed. They continued to receive such missives in the years that followed as they pursued justice in the courts.

Polls revealed that the majority of Ohioans supported the action of the Guard and felt no remorse for the deceased. I don’t even know how to fathom such a level of …what is it? Coldness? Hate? Insensitivity? Anger? Evil? All of the above? But then this is a country in which lynchings not only went unpunished for 100 years but spectators showed up to watch a person being tortured and murdered.

How do you make sense of this? How do you make sense of our current administration? Their callousness? Their total lack of empathy? Look at what ICE has been doing in this country and how it is with the full support of the administration and for that matter many (though not a majority) of Americans.

Recently I was reading a book that detailed the massacres under Stalin in the USSR in the 1930s. This included mass starvation. That is intentional mass starvation as in: let’s allow these people to starve and in fact facilitate it. 

Under Stalin any perceived enemy was subject to summary executions. It’s staggering how many people Stalin had executed for suspicion of the merest slight.

It’s also incomprehensible how many people throughout history have found that indiscriminate killing is the solution to political problems. Nearly 40,000 demonstrators have been slaughtered in Iran during the recent demonstrations there. So we’re not talking about ancient history.

Speaking of depressing….The Epstein files. I walked by a group of high school girls the other day. They appeared to be around fifteen and sixteen, maybe sophomores. It occurred to me that they were around the age, in some cases even older, than a lot of the girls Epstein and his cronies were raping. I found it heartbreaking. Powerful rich, white people think they can get away with anything most probably because they usually do. The best example is our current president whose gotten away with everything this side of murder. Oh and if you’re a journalist and you ask him about some of his sins, he’ll call you stupid, say you’re a terrible reporter and work for a failing organization. If you’re a female he might complain that you never smile and might call you piggy. He can also label you a “loser.” I’ve never known what it means to be a “loser” aside from being the individual or team that fails to win an athletic contest and even then it’s harsh.

There is a lot of love and warmth and tenderness and kindness in this world but there is also what I’ve described above. The failure of empathy. The unwillingness and inability to understand our differences. The belief that different is wrong. It’s utterly heartbreaking. It’s also unavoidable. It’s in the news every single day. It’s throughout our history books. It goes back to the beginnings of civilization and has never stopped. 

It’s impossible to make sense of. Thankfully many of us our surrounded by love and we cherish those around us and are accepting of others even if they are of a different religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality or political stripe. We have to keep pushing against the Donald Trumps of the world. We have to fight for justice, truth and equality. Giving up is not an option. Without hope we’re dead. The death of hope is the death of morality. As we said in the Sixties, “keep the faith baby.”