Song 510: This week the playlist comes around to Ohio by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, written by Neil Young, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. Today being the 50th anniversary of the Kent State Massacre, it seemed like an appropriate moment to feature the stirring opus that Mr. Young wrote about the horrific incident. I had to do the post a day late this week due to a minor sickness that kept me in bed yesterday, but maybe that actually turns out to be a good thing. During my freshman year at NU, I joined a mass demonstration protesting the Nixon/Kissinger bombing campaign of Cambodia which would end up killing millions of innocent civilians. That day, a similar protest happened at Kent State, and there, national guard soldiers fired at the crowd, killing 4 students. On hearing the news about the shooting, we at NU had a bigger and louder follow-up mass demonstration, as did many other campuses across the country. When summer rolled around, I spent a good portion of it working as a counselor and music teacher at a music and art summer camp near Camptown, PA, where I heard no news whatsoever about the rest of the world, so I missed the release of this amazing hit. However, not long after I returned to Evanston, IL, at the end of the summer, I did get to hear it, and it gave me chills the first time around because it painted such a clear and compelling picture of what happened in May in Ohio. On a side note, at our protest on 5/4, someone approached me with a petition to have Nixon impeached, and I reacted by saying, “But if he got removed, then we'd have Agnew as president!” Given that reality, I couldn't sign the paper, no matter how much I might have agreed with its POV.
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