Interpolating the present into the past is one of my pet peeves. It’s rampant in PBS’s latest series “World on Fire.” But while I might excuse artistic license, I can’t excuse journalists who do this.
The Recorder’s article on the Kent State massacre begins, “…much of the nation associated opposition to the Vietnam War with rich, privileged elites living in coastal cities.” What? Opposition to the Vietnam War was primarily associated with activist students all across the country. And nobody thought of older, high profile activists — the Berrigan Brothers, Benjamin Spock, the baby doctor, or Martin Luther King — as “elites.” There was no coastal/interior divide.
Factories in the Midwest were still humming, unions were strong, college tuition was low, and taxes on the rich were high. It was no particular revelation that Kent State students came from the working class. So did students throughout the Midwest. Factory jobs paid well, and strong unions, like the UAW, made sure that state legislatures funded higher education so that workers’ children could get an education.
It is true that the anti-war movement, along with the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement, splintered the coalition between educated liberals and the working class that had existed since the New Deal and that Republicans from Nixon to Trump exploited that division. But it would take the decimation of America’s factories and their unions, negligible tax rates for the rich, and exponential increases in college tuition (along with Fox News) to create the massive resentment and divisions in terms of class and geography that exist today. Don’t imagine they have always been with us, at least not in their present configuration and intensity.
Kathe Geist is a resident of Charlemont.