Kent State Descending the Gravity Well: An Analysis of the Observer

Author’s Notes

This is the one story I’ve written as me, Jim Gardner, rather than from some fictional point of view. It’s not quite a true story — I never actually sat down and wrote out the “scribbles” as they appear — but the ideas did cross my mind as I saw how the press tried to deal with the twentieth anniversary of the killings at Kent State University. Our beloved media (as they so often do) wrote around the facts without ever truly connecting to the reality of what happened.

The shootings seem like ancient history now; but for the sake of our souls, we have to remember that history is about real people with real lives and real deaths. There’s something disturbing about the air of unreality with which we often view the past — as if anything that happened more than a few days ago took place in some alien dimension that doesn’t have much to do with who we are now. I’m certainly guilty of feeling that way, too... which is one reason I wrote a story about fading memories and trivializing other people’s tragedies.