Forty-six years ago, something very important died in this country

"Four dead in Ohio ..."
-- NEIL YOUNG

It was a Monday -- May 4th, 1970 -- and college students all over the country were protesting the fact that President Nixon had illegally expanded the Vietnam War into Cambodia.

Nixon and his vice president, Spiro T. Agnew, were pretty much waging war on anyone presumptuous enough to oppose their policies in Southeast Asia.

Just three days earlier, in a speech at the Pentagon, Nixon raised the ante by calling protesters "bums."

"You know, you see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses," he said. "Listen, the boys on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world -- going to the greatest universities -- and here they are burning up the books."

Kent State wasn't the only protest in Ohio, but Gov. James Rhodes sent the National Guard in and the situation grew tense over the weekend.

I was 20 that spring and not in school, but I was spending as much time as possible at George Washington University with my girlfriend. We were together in the early afternoon when the news came in from Ohio that four students were dead at Kent State.

That was the day I learned it was possible to be shocked and completely unsurprised at the same time. Shocked that the constitutional right to protest meant so little, but not surprised at all that things had come to this in Nixon's America.

It was the second major example of the power structure striking out at those who wanted to protest it.

And if we view Kent State as the true end of what we know as the Sixties, a decade that went from Dallas to Philadelphia, Miss., to Memphis to Los Angeles to Chicago to Altamont to Kent, Ohio, it was a decade in which American youth lost its innocence.

There's a tremendous irony in all this. Millions of people who later realized what a disaster our involvement in Vietnam was still blamed those who had been opposed. And when chickenhawks like Ronald Reagan started saying the only thing wrong with our involvement in Vietnam was that we didn't win, the divisions grew deeper and deeper.

We had Reagan, who sold war bonds instead of facing enemy fire. We had Gee Dubya, who skipped out on his last year of National Guard service, and Cheney, who said he had "other priorities" when it came to Vietnam.

And then there was Trump. The presumptive Republican nominee, who would certainly be in the running for World's Greatest Egomaniac, actually claimed that his experience in military school taught him more about the military than being in the Army would have done.

Have we really become that stupid?

Have we gone so far down the rabbit hole since Kent State that we view Donald Trump as someone fit to lead our country?

Say what you like about Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, but at least much of their lives have been in public service. That's also true for many of the also-rans on the Republican side.

Not Trump.

He has never done one thing that wasn't about himself.

And that's where we are 46 years after the killing of four students in Kent, Ohio.

In a very sad place.