* Negotiating the Dangerous Shoals of Manhood

  

May 4, 1970 - July 20, 2012

When I looked at the bodies, especially the boy whose head was bleeding on the asphalt, bleeding so much blood that he could not possibly be alive, when I looked at them, an eerie quiet had come over the hundreds who, just moments before,  had been shouting at the National Guard, themselves youths in their twenties.  

Then one by one a few people shouted ‘fuck you’ or began sobbing, or screamed a cry of disbelief. Silence returned as adults told everyone to leave.

Time seemed slower---or my dazed perception of it made it seem slower.

Even though I was an employee, a graduate counselor, I decided to get in my car,  without taking any clothes or possessions or even telling anyone I was leaving, and simply drive out of town.

The university phone I had tried to use to call my parents in Connecticut was dead. 


I would be trapped if I stayed.


I drove to Cleveland and the phone lines lay on the ground being "repaired" as I abandoned the small Ohio town.

It was 1970. 


It was Kent State.

It is now 42-years later and the worst shooting on American soil has just occurred early this morning in Aurora, Colorado in a movie theater at midnight on the first showing of the new Batman movie.

Students protest the police shooting of students at Jackson State, 1970.

Like the soldiers at Kent State, and the police at Jackson State, like the killers at Columbine and Virginia Tech, and the killer at Gabrielle Giffords’ rally, it was not a woman who pulled the trigger last midnight in Colorado..

The problem is not guns.  The problem is not violence in the media.

The problem is masculinity.


And modern culture’s confusion over what makes a man.

My heart goes out to the victims of this tragedy.

And also to our modern world, lost in its confusion.  

Paul D. Keane

M.A., M.Div., M.Ed.