May 4, 1970

Culture war. I was having a swell time of it, actually, until several months later when I decided I was full of shit and crashed down hard. But thinking back on what the Kent State shootings meant in the country, I'd say it was yet another signal that the social fissures went way beyond "minorities" and ghettos and enclaves of alienation. The soldiers were surely as alienated as the crowd they were shooting at. Eerily, the Social Movement petered out over the next year or so, but social movement didn't. I'd been swirled and thrown down by "The Sixties" originally but the result was to give people like me (whoever that means) more space to maneuver. The country ultimately did take kindlier to weirdos, though people got tired of overall social responsibility, eventually slid into the selfishness of the tax revolts and the Reagan government.