Classics and Soon-to-be Classics

Posted on August 16, 2026 by Kathy

A good run of reading recently, marked especially by getting through The Count of Monte Cristo (1846) by Alexandre Dumas, all 1200 pages. Endearing Instagram blogger Chris Fizer recommended it. In fact, he recommends it in almost every post. Lots of other people do, too, so many that one could say this hefty opus is having a moment. Dumas and his collaborator, Auguste Paquet, provide action, plot twists, suspense, and surprises on nearly every page. There’s violence, I would warn you, but this is one of the most satisfying and enjoyable reads of my life.

I read The Leopard, another classic, because Ann Patchett recommended it on one of her weekly book posts and I was always intending to. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s single novel was published posthumously, in 1958, and deals with the downstream effects of the Risorgimento, the Italian unification effort of the 1860s. The book didn’t go as fast as the Count did, but it’s a memorable and moving. Fabrizio, the main character, is an aristocrat who is seeing his privilege and his life slipping away. Lampedusa writes gorgeous passages and gorgeous sentences. Last night I followed up by watching the 1963 Luchino Visconti film, three hours long, starring Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale, and Alain Delon (available on Amazon and YouTube). Sumptuous and mostly faithful to the book, it shortchanges nuance, especially regarding the women characters. It also, understandably, cuts short the ending, which is one of the most affecting parts of the novel. Beautiful, nonetheless.

Soon to be a classic is 2025’s Raising Hare, a memoir by British writer Chloe Dalton. Finding an abandoned newborn hare on a walk near her country house, Dalton hesitantly picks it up, brings it home, and spends the next several years observing it and cherishing the experience. She goes so far as to build a little hare door on her house, and the hare (always unnamed) spends its nights outside and its days sleeping near her as she works. This is Dalton’s first book, beautifully written and a smash best-seller.

Amongst all of these, I sporadically pick up What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life (2020) by poet Mark Doty. I loved Doty’s 2007 memoir Dog Years. He appears in an excellent new documentary, Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World (available now on PBS), where he reminded me of himself. At the same time, I’m making my way through Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” which I’ve never read all the way through. Both are gratifying and enjoyable, but not as action-packed as The Count. Sui generis.

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Many Workbooks Available

Posted on August 1, 2026 by Kathy

It all started in the car, where a lot of interesting conversations with kids take place.

As we drove from their house to ours, the grand-twins, Celia and Hank, now 5, were asking me if driving was fun. I responded that I generally enjoy driving. They wondered, they said, because driving the kiddie cars at a local amusement park is fun. They asked me if the kiddie rides would be helpful when they finally learn to drive. Are they actually learning some useful skills? That led to some talk about the required age for driving, which flowed into wondering when you can have a cell phone, which they seemed to think also had a legal minimum age. (Alas, it doesn’t.) They mentioned some teens they know who can drive and who have phones.

Arriving at my house with visions of adulthood dancing in their heads, they immediately set about playing grownup. Celia planted herself at Papa’s desk with some paper and pens, establishing a doctor’s waiting room where she would greet patients and take their vital signs. First, Papa had to fashion a computer for her by writing the alphabet on keys drawn on a sheet of paper. Celia assiduously tapped her fingers on the keys before she called Papa in as her first patient. She appeared to combine the roles of receptionist, nurse, and doctor.

Meanwhile, Hank was asking me questions about grownup books, which, he noted, have so many pages and so many words, but no pictures. He was understandably intrigued by my current book, The Count of Monte Cristo, consisting of many thousands of words filling up 1200 pages. How does such a book happen? he wondered. Does the person writing it produce it in their house? I provided a quick overview of the process of writing the book, sending it to a publisher, and the publisher producing many copies, which people can then buy. (Yep, that’s how easy it is.) I skirted the issues around Alexandre Dumas’s publishing the book in installments first and the complications of translation into English.

I’ll be a publisher, he said. While the medical professional labored in one half of the living room, Hank began setting up his business in the other half. He’s been creating a lot of dinosaur books recently with his own illustrations and dino facts, the pages glued or stapled together. Today, though, he didn’t want his usual quantity of blank paper to draw on. Instead, he asked for paper with writing on it. He wanted pages with text. Papa found him some old printouts with film reviews and press releases. Then we pulled out the stapler and fastened the pages. Hank wasn’t doing any drawing yet.

He wanted one blank sheet of paper for the cover. He asked me to spell out the words that he had chosen for the title. Many. I spelled many. Workbooks, he said, but told me to just spell work because he could spell books. I spelled work, and Hank wrote it down. He hesitated. He told me that he could spell book, but not books. That was easily solved.

Next, Hank asked me to spell Uh. Puzzled, I said, Many Workbooks Uh? Hank said, No. Many Workbooks Uh-Vailable. So I dutifully spelled available, which Hank dutifully transcribed.

His book title was Many Workbooks Available. Don’t ask me. I have no idea.

Because grown-up books usually have some art on the cover, Hank moved to the dining room table to complete the cover. We stapled it to the front of his pages. Under the title Many Workbooks Available was a drawing of a woman with her breast exposed as she fed a baby. Hank has a two-month-old baby brother.

The book went home with the twins. They requested it be read to them at bedtime. The parents reported that the film-related text on Hank’s book pages had largely to do with Holocaust movies, requiring some on-the-spot editing as they read. The kids asked for this bedtime reading at least a couple of evenings in a row, but were nonplussed that Mommy and Daddy’s readings, with their impromptu censorship, differed slightly. Even so, Celia’s verdict was that she liked it.

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What Is a Phone?

Posted on June 16, 2026 by Kathy

Recently I posted the following on Facebook:

Grandson wanted Papa to make him a phone out of paper. Papa became exasperated not knowing how to do this but eventually followed directions. The result was several smallish pieces of paper stapled together. “How is that a phone?” Papa asked.

Grandson answered, “I’m going to write information on the pages. Then when someone want to know something, they can look it up.”

A phone to my five-year-old grandson, then, is mainly a device for looking up information. When he has a question about sharks, dinosaurs, or outer space, the adults in his life often grab their phones. Phone = Google. The phone he created contained drawings of Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops. That’s the kind of info people would be looking for, after all.

I did not add his twin sister’s follow-up activity to my Facebook post, which was like her brother’s but different. She wanted to make a phone, too, and so we stapled together a similar book-like collection of blank paper, roughly the size of a cell phone. On the front page she wanted to write the date and time. (I told her it was 2:15, and she wrote “512.”) The date was June 8, 2026, which we added to the front in some fashion.

On the next page, she asked me to write the numbers 1-40 in small squares. I think this was her best approximation of a phone keypad. On the next page, she wrote the alphabet. On later pages, she drew pictures of her family members.

I surmised that she was creating a representation of her mother’s phone as she experienced it. First comes the lock screen with the date and time. If you’re making a call, you tap on the keypad. I think she knew vaguely that the alphabet appears thereabouts amidst a bunch of numbers. The family portraits approximate her mom’s plethora of photos–images of friends, family, and places.

Both versions seemed fascinating to me. Not brilliant or artistically advanced–I’m not bragging about them. I’m just interested in how integral to their reality phones are and how similarly and differently they view them.

This activity didn’t make me feel old, as one might expect, and it didn’t make me bemoan the omnipresence of cell phones in all of our lives, as I do in other contexts. I just shared my husband’s initial bewilderment with the project and then enjoyed understanding what they were going for. So interesting to see how they both saw it as feasible to make a phone out of paper and at the same time had completely different versions of the same device.

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An Etymological Course

Posted on June 5, 2026 by Kathy
Photo by Fausto García-Menéndez on Unsplash

A person dear to my heart is currently in the throes of prodromal labor. Its common synonym, false labor, is something of a misnomer, because it’s not a mere fake out; it’s a precursor. Prodromal is used for any early stage of a medical condition, for example, the headache or mild nausea that might precede a cold or flu. It’s not false. It’s just early.

Not surprisingly, the prefix pro means “before.” The Greek root of –dromal means “race” or “course,” so precursor is an almost literal synonym. In fact, pregnancy’s end stages, from confusing contractions, to aching joints, to fatigue and sleeping disturbances, all the way to true labor and childbirth, might well be considered an arduous course the mother must run. Prodromal labor is an early part of the race.

Speaking of courses, the Greek used dromos to create hippodromos, a course for horses. Ruins of Greek hippodromes survive on Delos, at Delphi, and in Alexandria, among other places. Because they were built to accommodate an audience, the term hippodrome came to mean theater or auditorium. Cleveland’s Hippodrome theater opened on Euclid Avenue in 1907 and was at the time the world’s second largest theater, holding over 3,000 spectators. No horses allowed.

Hippos, too, would be banned from the premises. As you probably know, hippopotamus combines the Greek words for horse and river. Hippos, then, were river horses, named by apparently nearsighted Europeans. In Swahili, they answer to kiboko. The Zulu term invubu means “mixed up” or “combined,” presumably because of hippos’ confusion as to whether they’re land animals or water animals.

The root potamus did not give our Potomac River its name. which is of Algonquin origin, but it helped name Mesopotamia. That land is between (meso-) rivers: the Tigris and Euphrates. Meso- appears in many English words, including mesosaur, a middle-sized dinosaur.

Dinosaur itself means “awesome/terrible lizard.” One of the most impressive dinosaur names is the not medium-sized acrocanthosaurus, meaning “high-spined lizard.” Acro-, meaning “high,” can be seen in words such as acrobat, acrophobia, and Acropolis.

Like pregnancy, this discourse must come to an end, although once we get started on dinosaur names it could go on endlessly. (Ask my grandson.) Pregnancies seem short in retrospect, but at the time seem like racing an endless course, like connecting one word with the next and the next, kind of like a palindrome, running forward and back .

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Vestibular Adventures

Posted on May 29, 2026 by Kathy
Photo by Franco Antonio Giovanella on Unsplash

Last week, the ER nurse gave me a prescription for meclizine, the main ingredient of dramamine, to treat my vertigo. My world had been spinning for almost a week at that point She said it wasn’t a cure but would lessen the dizziness. “How does it work?” I asked. “If it doesn’t fix the problem, what does it do?”

Surprisingly, she couldn’t answer, but, impressively, she googled it. She read aloud something like this: “Meclizine is an antihistamine and anticholinergic medication used to suppress the inner ear, or vestibular system.” That wasn’t much help, frankly, but I appreciated the effort.

At home later that day, I (of course) looked it up myself. I was especially intrigued by the word vestibular. I knew it had to do with the inner ear, but felt compelled to know what it meant, that is, what its root was.

As I began searching, suddenly vestibule jumped out at me. I know what a vestibule is. It’s the entryway to a church, just outside the doors of the sanctuary. It’s where the ushers hang out during Mass rather than attending to the the sermon. The term seems to be interchangeable these days with narthex, although I associate that term with my Protestant in-laws and never heard it in the Catholic churches I grew up in. Narthex comes from the Greek word for fennel, because the area’s narrow shape mimicked the plant’s. But narthex has nothing to do with my ears, so we’re moving on.

There is an impressive bunch of things in the inner ear, including the cochlea, the stapes, the otolith organs, the urticle, the saccule, and a fluid called endolymph. So many words! So many etymological blog posts!

Focus!

Turns out the vestibular area of the ear has an actual vestibule. It’s a fluid-filled cavity that, as you probably know, aids in balance. It’s a space, just like the vestibule in St. Paul’s in North Canton, the church I grew up in. The Latin word vestibulum means “an entrance hall,” or, the open space between the street and the entrance to a Roman house.

Vestibulum in turn derives from the noun vestis (as in vest, vestment, and divest, and many others). The vestibule was the appropriate place to remove or adjust your outdoor clothing. The suffix -bulum frequently refers to a place.

The answer to my emergency room question was something like this. The antihistamine in my vertigo medication prevents the inner ear’s discombobulation from being communicated to the brain. I used only one tablet, and my vertigo resolved itself a day or two later. My vestibular inner-ear space has, thankfully, settled down.

As to vertigo, if you’ve ever experienced it, you won’t be surprised to learn that it comes from the Latin word for “turn” or “spin.”

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To Ban or Not to Ban

Posted on March 23, 2026 by Kathy
Photo by Austrian National Library on Unsplash

I belong to a Banned Book Book Club (BBBC) that meets once a month via Zoom. At each meeting, we discuss where and why our book was banned – often more difficult to determine than you might think. This month’s selection, for example, Regeneration (1991) by Pat Barker, seems to have been challenged as “supplemental reading” in a Georgia school district in 2020 for “explicit” or “unacceptable” content. This content may have been the homosexuality of some of the characters, the sexual behavior of other characters, or the violence and horror of some of the scenes. Regeneration takes place during World War I, and there’s nothing more violent and horrible than the trenches of France in 1917.

I’m learning to question the offhand use of the word banned. Is a superintendent’s refusal to okay a book on a supplemental reading list the same thing as banning? If parents question a teacher’s assigning Slaughterhouse 5, is that the same as banning? If a district removes Judy Blume’s books from their library, is that the same as banning? Does the Department of Defense’s removal of almost 600 books from their schools’ classes and libraries—focusing on subjects like diversity, race, puberty, and LGBTQ themes—constitute banning?

These actions seem different to me, but they’re all lumped under the umbrella term banned books. In some cases, a more accurate term might be challenged. At the very least, such book challenges complicate the lives of teachers and librarians. At the worst, they may result in firing or impair readers’ ability to read books. But a particular school’s deciding not to teach I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is not the same as, say, an entire city removing Maya Angelou from its libraries.

I recently tripped over another complication with the term book banning. Having just read Making Mary Poppins: The Sherman Brothers, Walt Disney, and the Creation of the Classic Film by Todd James Pierce, I picked up the original Mary Poppins by P. J. Travers, which I had never read. Thinking about the concerns some fundamentalist Christians have with The Wizard of Oz and other books involving magic, I googled to see if Mary Poppins’s magical adventures had ever been banned. They have, but not by conservatives.

Some on the left have trouble with Mary Poppins. They have objected to Travers’s use of the word Hottentot. Mary tells her little charge Michael not to behave like a “Red Indian.” In the original edition of 1934, Mary and the children use a magic compass to visit the four corners of Earth and encounter “Eskimos” in the North, and people in the South who are “black all over and with very few clothes.” Travers changed this chapter, called “Bad Tuesday,” first in 1967 and then again in 1981, transforming the people into animals (e.g., a polar bear and a macaw).In 1980, a librarian named Joan Dillon defended the San Francisco Public Library system’s removing the book from circulation, saying, “It’s not censorship. It’s selection after careful review. It’s not a very good book.”

I understand the concerns about race and stereotypes, but I’m not comfortable with Ms. Collins deciding that a book can’t stay on the shelves because it’s “not a very good book.”

Also from the left, J.K. Rowling books are being blackballed, not because of the wizards and spells, but because of Rowling’s expressed attitudes about transgender medical treatments.

One more. In July of 2008, I recall a friend’s suggestion that copies of Barry Blitt’s controversial cartoon cover of the New Yorker depicting the Obamas as militant radicals be burned. She knew that the image was satiric, but most people would take it literally, she said. An avowed liberal, she wanted to burn the magazines she objected to.

I’m not going to sum things up here at the end, because I’m not sure what I think about all of the above. I lean toward a libertarian dissemination of books and information, but I respect parents’ rights to have a say in what their kids read, just not in what other kids read. Otherwise, I can tell you that I recommend all the titles mentioned above, especially Regeneration.

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David and Kathy in Transit

Posted on March 1, 2026 by Kathy

I first encountered author David Guterson in 1992, when he was a handsome young father homeschooling his children and working as a public-school English teacher on Bainbridge Island in Washington State. In 1992, I was also a homeschooling parent and a once and future English teacher. I read everything about homeschooling back then, including Guterson’s Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense, a personal account of his family’s homeschooling life. He was a clear, appealing stylist, and we shared reservations about the mass education of young people. Like me, Guterson liked teaching and liked his students, but loved watching his kids flourish at home with the attention of both of their parents.

 His 1994 novel, Snow Falling on Cedars, along with a movie deal (the film came out in 1999), made him famous. I read and loved his 1999 novel, East of the Mountains, even more. I think I may have read Ed King in 2011, although I don’t remember it.

Since then silence, that is, for me. I didn’t keep up with David. Turns out he’s written thirteen books in all, which I didn’t realize until the other day, when I walked past Evelyn in Transit on the New Releases shelf at the library and thought, “Oh. My old friend David Guterson.”

Evelyn is an odd book. The two main characters, who are featured in alternate chapters, have no connection for three fourths of the book. Guterson, in effect, buries the lede–their surprising connection comes at the end. In addition to this unorthodox structure, the writing style is notably spare, cryptic, and unsentimental.

Thus, I won’t be recommending Evelyn in Transit exactly. It’s something other than a compelling narrative–character-driven and theme-driven instead. Guterson wants to explore how to live a meaningful life and chose to write an unconventional novel to do so. A lot of readers on Amazon and Goodreads have disliked it.

I understand those readers, but I disagree. I like and respect Evelyn in Transit. Pick it up if you’re interested in Tibetan Buddhism, reincarnation, odd-duck characters, and occasional sparks of ironic wit. Guterson has written an economical, meticulous, intentional novel. I’ll use this opportunity to advocate for excellent, interesting midlist books. Not every worthwhile book is reviewed in the New York Times and featured on NPR.

David Guterson’s homeschooled kids are grown up now. He’s a grandfather. My kids are grown up too, and I’m a grandparent. I see on YouTube videos that David’s hairline has receded. I won’t enumerate my own physical changes in the past thirty years, but David likely wouldn’t recognize me. I’m so glad to learn that he’s still writing, and that there are lots of his books to catch up on. Let us know if you’ve read any of them.

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A Lincoln Portrait

Posted on February 14, 2026 by Kathy

Almost ten years after my first attempt, today I finished George Saunders’s 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo, just in time for Lincoln’s 217th birthday. This was my third run at the book, and this time I finally made it through.

I have a distorted memory of my first two efforts, retaining an impression of a lot of bathroom humor and potty jokes, which, even though I’m not prudish (I don’t think), were too sophomoric for me. Turns out I mostly made that up. A single poop appears on page 6. About twenty pages later, there’s a “swollen member,” but, really, such references are scattered and pretty innocuous. It’s a mystery how I so drastically misread the book.

The novel begins with speeches by seemingly random people who inhabit a weird unfamiliar place; an acquaintance described it to me as “almost science fiction.” It reads like a play, a lot of it comic, mostly dialogue and short prose passages, with lots of white space on the page. It goes fast, then, once you get into it and figure out what’s going on. Googling after I finished, I found this brief, genial guide provided by Saunders himself. Check it out if you find the book’s experimental format daunting.

Coincidentally, just as I began Lincoln earlier this week, I received an email from a stranger, a friend of a friend, who loves George Saunders so much that she’s looking for a like-minded fan to communicate with. Our mutual friend thought I might be such a person. I loved Saunders’s short story collection Tenth of December (2013) and his 2021 essay collection A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. Like everybody else, I admire his inspiring Syracuse commencement speech from 2013. I probably haven’t read as much Saunders as my prospective correspondent (I haven’t heard back from her since I responded), but I’m a fan.

Saunders’s down-to-earth goodness makes him an ideal conduit to convey Lincoln’s humanity and his profound grief over the loss of his son Willie to typhoid fever in 1862. What do you do with grief? How do you live with loss? Saunders’s imagining of Lincoln’s thoughts reflects his own generosity.

“His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow, toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow, that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.”

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Carpe Diem

Posted on February 5, 2026 by Kathy

I didn’t realize when I chose the cover photo for my book Lead Me, Guide Me: The Life and Example of Father Dan Begin that its significance would be lost on many readers—maybe most readers. I should have done more explaining.

The book does provide some context. I explained that Father Dan’s friend, former Cleveland newsman Ted Henry, got married at his farm in Rock Creek, Ohio. It was a second marriage for both Ted and his bride, officiated by a woman friend who acquired a certificate online. At the conclusion of the ceremony, Father Dan removed his jacket and opened his shirt to reveal the “Carpe Diem” tee shirt underneath.

By some lights, I went on, Father Dan shouldn’t even have been there. The Catholic Church frowns on outdoor weddings, and it still frowns, to put it mildly, on divorced Catholics remarrying. But he didn’t perform the wedding, and so, Ted told me, “He really didn’t break the rules. Almost, but not quite.”

That’s where my explanation stopped. I thought the connotations of that picture would be self-evident, but I’ve learned they’re not.

First, not everybody knows that the Latin expression “Carpe diem” means “seize the day.” (More than one person has asked me.) To be precise, “carpe” means something more like “pluck,” as in plucking a grape from a vine. The command is to pluck each day and savor its sweet juices. But “pluck the day” sounds weird in English, so we translate it loosely as “seize the day.”

The phrase comes from the Roman poet Horace’s Odes, published in 23 BCE, that is, before the birth of Christ. His line goes, “carpe diem quam minimum credula postero,” which can be translated as “pluck the day, believing as little as possible in the next one.” Life is short, and you better enjoy it now. Horace was a pagan, and others who’ve celebrated carpe diem are even more pagan, that is, more inclined to, shall we say, self-indulgent behavior.

The sentiment, if not the actual phrase, appears in Andrew Marvell’s poem To His Coy Mistress, for example, in which the poet urges his girlfriend to sacrifice her virginity for pleasure, because time is fleeting. A bunch of Shakespeare’s sonnets encourage the young to procreate. Do it now! You’re aging by the minute! He and other poets often warn the ladies, “You’re not going to be beautiful forever!” Eat, drink, and be merry is the idea.

I’m trying to say that “carpe diem” is not a religious expression. It’s sure not close to anything I learned from the nuns at my parish Sunday school. It’s not inherently scandalous, but it does carry a whiff of secular self-indulgence.

For Father Dan, though, the expression evoked the line from Psalm 118: “This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad.”  The past is over, the future is uncertain, he often said. He strived and mostly succeeded at living intentionally in every moment, and, more important, feeling grateful for it.

To me, that photo and that tee shirt represent so much about him. He was a Catholic priest standing at his divorced friend’s outdoor wedding officiated by a lay woman. He ripped off his shirt and grinned. It’s a beautiful day. Seize it. Enjoy it. Smile (if you can) right now.

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Minneapolis, Deja Vu

Posted on January 25, 2026 by Kathy
Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

On the evening of May 4, 1970, I walked into the kitchen of our home in Canton. My dad was sitting in his wheelchair in his usual spot at the kitchen table, leaning toward the radio. As I approached, he shook his head and said, “This is bad. Really bad.”

In the preceding days, there had been demonstrations and rioting on the Kent State campus and in town. The ROTC Building had been burned to the ground. National Guardsmen, sent by Ohio Governor James Rhodes, had shot into a crowd of protesting students and killed four of them. Alison Krause, 19, and Jeffrey Miller, 20, were participating in the protest. Sandy Scheuer and William Schroeder, both 19, were bystanders observing the demonstration between classes. Nine other students were wounded, including Dean Kahler, who has spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

I was a Kent State freshman, living at home and attending the University’s Stark County campus. I had lived through the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the killings of Reverend Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, and Malcolm X. I had watched unremitting footage of battles in Vietnam and in our cities on the nightly news. This is to say that I was inured to violence. I understood that it was deplorable, but I was numb. I felt removed from the day’s events.

My father’s reaction broke through to me. My father understood that law enforcement officers should not be shooting down students on a college campus. He also understood, more clearly than I did, that a President elected to end a war in Asia should not be expanding that war into a neighboring country. President Nixon had announced our incursion into Cambodia in a television address a few days earlier.

Other adults, besides my father, impressed me with the intensity of their revulsion, including Channel Five’s news commentator Dorothy Fuldheim, whom we young people used to ridicule as hopelessly out of touch. In her evening broadcast, she asked, tears streaming down her face, “And who gave the National Guard the bullets? Who ordered the use of them? Since when do we shoot our own children?”  Neil Young wrote his iconic protest song “Ohio.” Several weeks after the shooting, the Akron Beacon Journal reported, “The four victims did nothing that justified their death. They threw no rocks nor were they politically radical. No sniper fired at the National Guard. No investigative agency has yet found any evidence sufficient to support such a theory.”

Many news outlets, politicians, and citizens, however, took a different position. In some cases, they had encouraged government’s overreach ahead of time. In April of 1970, while running for Governor, Ronald Reagan made this comment regarding campus unrest: “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.” Richard Nixon called protesters “bums.” James Rhodes said student protesters were communists and “worse than Brownshirts.”

After the killings, the vitriol continued. The first card that Dean Kahler received in the hospital told him that the sender wished he was dead. The Nixon tapes revealed that the President, about a year later, asking his Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, “You know what stops them? Kill a few. Remember Kent State? Didn’t it have one hell of an effect, the Kent State thing?”

As weeks passed, my sorrow and horror grew. A relative of mine reacted to my emotion by telling me, “They should have killed more of them.” We don’t execute people for protesting, I responded, or even for throwing stones at cops. He answered that maybe we should.

I need to point out that Kent State was not the only locus for campus violence. On May 15, 1970, police opened fire on a Black students’ protest at Mississippi’s Jackson State, killing two (Phillip Gibbs, 21, and James Earl Green, 17) and wounding twelve others. In the intervening years, police shootings have disproportionately affected Black people. In each case, some Americans protest the overreaction of armed officers, while others blame the victims.

Recent events, of course, are prompting these recollections. In today’s Minneapolis, of course, we can watch live video of the shootings, though these videos don’t seem conclusive to everyone. In 2026, it seems that the powers-that-be will fight to prevent investigations. In the 1970s, we had no videos, but American institutions, flawed though they were, conducted thorough investigations.

I’m not going to say that we’ve been here before and that we’ve survived such periods in our history. I am going to say that in similar eras some people have clearly seen that armed, uniformed government agents should not be gunning down Americans who are exercising their free-speech rights. And that other people, apparently always, perennially, despite the evidence and the Constitution, will say that the men with the guns are right and that the citizens who revere the 1st Amendment are wrong.

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