40 years ago today, four students marching for peace were killed by troops at Kent State.
Just an hour from the campus where I studied. (I’d just returned from a tour of duty in Japan with the U.S. Navy. The society I’d re-entered seemed as foreign as the Asia I had left.)
For many, including me, that day locked in our commitment to being involved in the world around us.
It’s one of those dates, like 9/11. You remember where you were when you heard, how your world changed, how you changed.
Who you are, what you believe in and the contribution you’re making is rooted in what’s happened to you and around you — more than you may be aware of day-to-day.
How about you? Leave a note in the comments below.
Consulting? Maybe speaking, writing, coaching, facilitating, teaching, advising? Get the special report I’m just now finishing on 3 strategies ... “How to create the consulting practice you really want.” Click here for your complimentary copy.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I am just thrilled to now know what my most important contribution in life is to be… Thanks to you Jim, I have also learned how to effectively enroll others in my journey… God Bless… Jerry Haney
Thanks for the reminder, Jim.
I was teaching high school in Lakewood and for the next few days in my English classes, we discussed Kent State. I slowed things down by asking each student to refrain from using the word “they” and instead identify a source (e.g., the name of someone being interviewed on Channel 8 last night at 11) and name who they were talking about rather using their first statements of “they said that they did this because they believed this” or something like that. The idea just came to me in the moment; I continue to use it forty years later.
As you say, Kent State was one of the things that developed my commitment to changing things.
Eight years later when I began three years of work on race and sex desegregation in Ohio schools, I worked from an office at Kent State. Each day I walked across “that” parking lot past “that” grassy hill on my way to and from work.
So the image of the place is burned into my brain both from the photos on the day and from the regular walk through that space for three years. The two dozen of us working on race and sex desegregation were keenly aware of the significance of the place. And we were also aware that the two black students who were killed at Jackson State ten days later did not cause as much outrage.
So we continued to raise that point as I do now.
I suppose that’s one thing I’ve learned in these forty years: things keep going wrong, so we need to keep working together to make more things go right.