Hippie Hunting Day

Today, around these parts, we celebrate Hippie Hunting Day. Not Hippie PUNCHING Day, that's another day entirely.

This day marks the day, 46 years ago, that the National Guard, who had been sent to (one of ) my Alma Mater(s) by the Governor to stop the riots and general destruction the hippies were causing on campus and around town, opened fire, and, National Guard being National Guard, missed most of the hippies entirely, killing three innocent bystanders and hitting only one actual hippie.

Naturally, the University celebrates this day every year. Oh, they call it a "commemoration," but seriously, if it weren't for that (and the fashion design program which is, apparently, one of the top ten in the world(!), though that came years later), no one would ever of heard of them.

There was even a famous song written about the thing. (Funny story: Back when BW3 was BW3, and in a different location from where it is now, the song was on the jukebox, but blocked so it wouldn't play.)

Anyway, every year, they bring in some embarrassingly liberal speaker to yammer on and on about peace and injustice and how the world is unfair and conservatives suck. This year, it'll be the mother of Tamir Rice, the kid who was shot dead in Cleveland while playing with a fake gun that  looked just like the real thing. (She's a new multi-millionaire, now, thanks to the taxpayers of Cleveland, by the way.) A few years back, it was Cindy Sheehan, the woman who lost her flippin' mind after her son was killed in Iraq.

I've actually been to the memorial and toured the site with a guy who got shot (who to this day blames the evil National Guard for everything, and not the hippies who were pelting them with rocks). You can still see some of the bullet holes if you know where to look, which I do.

It's just a shame that the Weathermen and the SDS, who had stoked the flames and incited the violence, skipped town just before the shooting started, like the cowards they were and are. Worse, he school actually had actual terrorist and all around Weatherman scum Bill Ayers to speak a few years ago.

The bar for what constitutes higher education gets lower and lower every year.
Here's the tune from the incident: (Trigger warning: It's full of hippies.)



P.S. You can get a cheap copy ($5 or so after S&H) of James Michener's well-researched non-fiction account at Amazon.