The Shootings at Kent State: The Search for Historical Accuracy (1998)

But the next war comes up, and everyone tells you that it's righteous too. Maybe they're mistaken or deluded. The people in charge, demanding this war, they aren't supervillains either. They believe they're fighting communism, and while they probably couldn't have known for sure at the time, history has shown it to have been horrible enough that some sort of strategy should've been employed (even if not a shooting war).

Are you going to be the one to back down? There's none of this wokeness that exists today. You'd be called worse than just a pussy for dodging it. Even those who knew of and understood shell shock only cut slack for those who had suffered it, you wouldn't get pre-emptive sympathy.

And those grandfathers and fathers who did go off and fight, you're sort of insulting them though not coming out and saying it outright. If you're morally justified in dodging the draft, should they have done the same? They didn't, so are they just amoral killers now? And this isn't going on in your own head, not entirely, you can tell they're sitting there thinking the same thing, wondering if you'll be one of the hippies that insults them by dodging.

There may be moral principles strong enough that it would demand someone dodge the draft, but those sorts of principles aren't popular or encouraged in the US. Why, if people will dodge the draft during bad wars because of this, what does it mean if the principles say "all wars in which enemies aren't landing on our beaching and dropping shells on our undefended cities are bad"? Well, it means that officeholders who will eventually want a war of their own can't have it. And all officeholders eventually want a war, even if they all can't agree on which.

That's why everyone didn't dodge the draft. Sociological pressures, psychological pressures. Ambiguous popular moralities and people not wise or strong enough to create better ones.

I was and am an ardent supporter of (and often, a participant in) the street protests of that era, and for the reforms and abolition for which they were calling. I was in the thick of the tear gas in Portland many times, hoping that our actions might lead to a greater respect for Black lives in the USA. And I wish Rittenhouse had stayed home that evening and that those protesters were alive and uninjured today.

That said, comparing his situation to this one is unfair.

Rittenhouse was in a violent and confusing scuffle and was injured immediately before engaging. He had a loaded gun pointed at him at the moment he fired at Grosskreutz. Using him as the poster boy for bogus self-defense claims, especially the extremely specious versions of them so often proffered by law enforcement when they kill dogs or humans, seems counter-productive.

These guardsmen had no comparable basis for fearing for their lives that day (or in the days prior, when they inflicted grotesque violence, including stabbing 11 people with bayonets).

The US fought in a lot more than a half dozen wars in the century before Kent State and it takes pretty interesting morality to judge them all “more or less” morally justified.

I mean, the National Guard being deployed to a campus protest is more newsworthy than the average campus shooting these days, even if no one is shot.