How about Peace People?

Stacey (Smith) Scarmack along with other students, were let out early from Psychology Class from Satterfield Hall at the Kent State University Campus on May 4, 1970, with a directive to go exercise their constitutional freedom to express the right to peacefully assemble by protesting the insensible dictates of international war.

She walked, on her way to the protest, toward Taylor behind the Ohio National Guardsmen, half way up the hill when shots rang out. People yelled, “There are snipers, there are snipers!” Stacey turned quickly around and ran away from the guardsmen. The ‘sniper’s’ turned out to be soldiers from Ohio.

The night before the ROTC building had burned. Having watched from the back window in the kitchen of the student Union where she cooked, at work, she witnessed the ROTC building burning to ash. At 11:00 PM she left work, headed to Prentice Hall, the dorm where she lived.

Upon walking by the burn site she asked an Ohio National Guardsman standing guard, “Don’t you feel silly guarding the ashes?” In reply the soldier said back to her, “We will get you tomorrow”.

Jerry Lewis, Professor of Sociology, after the noon hour May 4th shooting, riding in back of a jeep, shouted to the students with questions bullhorn, “Go Home, Go Home, they are going to kill you all!”, Stacey recalls.  Simultaneously, Doug Baird, who Stacey would later become a  close friend, came upon Sandra Lee Scheuer, one of the four fatally shot as she laid dying. Doug’s life was forever psychologically scarred.

Life as a human being always comes full circle from whence it began. It is our rightful bond to see that living life is first and foremost focused on peacemaking all time, everywhere, and withholding everyone.