Time warped

Gray Saturday morning in late April now, and I can't but think of May.

Can't but think of a blue sky and green everywhere and the glorious way the sun feels, warm hand on your neck after the winter cold.  Can't but think of blood running black on white pavement in a black-and-white photo, and of a young girl with her mouth open in an agonized scream, and of tear gas and the pop-pop-pop of gunfire and death in the afternoon on an American college campus.

Four dead in Ohio. I think someone wrote a song about that once, long, long ago.

I can't but remember that this morning, looking at the photos -- in living color, this time -- from Dunn Meadow on the campus of Indiana University. On one side of the photo is a line of helmeted, dressed-for-combat police. A few yards a way, facing them, is a knot of students not nearly so well deployed, looking not unlike those college students over in Ohio in that long-ago time.

And up on the roof of the IU Student Union, overlooking the meadow?

Here's another photo. It's of a man with a rifle. I can think of no earthly reason why he's up there, but just seeing him sent a chill down the spine of this 69-year-old man who has seen too much and remembers too much.

Mostly I remember those black-and-white photos from Kent State, early May of 1970, and all the psychic echoes they stirred up as I looked at the photos from just this week at IU. You may call me a silly coot jumping at shadows, but I can't shake the feeling that I've seen all this before and I know how it ends. And I wonder how supposedly educated people like university president Pamela Whitten and the rest of the crowd at IU can't see it, too.

They all have a pile of degrees, I'm guessing. Apparently none of them are in history, however, the damn fools.

Oh, they got lucky the other day, even if their solution was some straight-up BS right out of 1970 America. They wanted that knot of pro-Palestinian student protestors to vacate Dunn Meadow, so they simply changed the rules on them one day and then sent in the combat-ready cops the next to enforce the rules they'd just made up. 

It worked. The cops arrested a bunch of protestors, and dispersed the rest. No one got shot, thankfully. No one died.  Again, they got lucky.

But next time?

Not taking any bets on that one.

Not taking bets, because Pamela Whitten and the IU crowd aren't the only damn fools running around loose these days, and some of them are even bigger damn fools. A bunch of them skulk around the halls of Congress, and they seem to be spoiling for a fight with protestors they don't like. The vandals who assaulted police officers and trashed the seat of American government three years ago, they'll defend to their last breath; bunch of snot-nosed college kids staging sit-ins to protest  what's happening in Gaza, they want expelled, arrested or beaten to a bloody pulp -- or all three.

Or they want them dead.

Granted, none of them will say that. But when lint-brains like Tom Cotton get up and say we should send in the National Guard to restore order, and lots of people around him start nodding, that's where we're headed. Ask any of us who remember what happens when you send in the National Guard to "restore order."

Four dead in Ohio. That's what happens.

And, yeah, maybe I am a silly coot to think that, but I can't help how time-warped I felt when I saw the photos from Dunn Meadow this week. And then to read what people were saying who were all for it, and to realize I heard the exact same things from the exact same sort of people 54 years ago about Kent State.

Good lord, someone even hauled out the one about how most of the protestors weren't actually students but "outside agitators." Outside agitators? Again? What the hell year is this, anyway?

And why do I think it doesn't matter, because apparently it's a home truth that if you live long enough, sooner or later you're destined to see the same terrible mistakes repeated?