Healing An American Wound

March 26, 2019 by Laurel Krause

As a survivor of the May 4, 1970 Kent State massacre, late March 2019 has been a painful time. Over the past week two survivors of the Parkland massacre have killed themselves and one father of a child killed at Sandy Hook took his life at Town Hall. These three suicides provide signposts for the world yet few in America understand the reasons these survivors have taken their lives. https://cnn.it/2CPhEB1

My sister Allison Krause’s killing by gunfire from Ohio National Guardsmen as she protested the Vietnam war on her Kent State University campus, and her death in this very public massacre defines my life. My experiences with grief and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have transformed me into who I am today.

As I share my story of Kent State PTSD, I hope it encourages others to heal their own wounds of trauma whatever they may be. Life is for living and healing.

These three suicides deeply re-injured my Kent State wounds. The soul of America suffers even more. Because our government traumatizes us, all Americans have these wounds that never really heal. Unless we take steps to heal, wounds continue to fester and trigger us throughout our lives.

When I Lost Allison

At 15 years old arriving home from junior high school, I had no idea how important May 4, 1970 was going to be in my life. From the bags of mail received by my family for a decade, we learned many Americans also felt the trauma and were angry from the wrongs of that day. Many shared how they felt it “could have been them.” http://bit.ly/P4T2SN

Following Allison’s killing, there was no help, support and care from the U.S. government who perpetrated Kent State and Jackson State. My family along with other Kent State survivors and many peaceful protesters against war became enemies of the state. Because my family demanded truth at Kent State were “it” and we have been ever since. Project Censored on Kent State truth by Mickey Huff and Laurel Krause https://bit.ly/3r5fh92

The war came home in May 1970. Our government targeted us delivering generational trauma at Kent State in the killing of four students and wounding of nine at an antiwar protest, and 11 days later two students killed, 12 wounded at Jackson State. The U.S. government aimed gun violence at student protesters against war. Following the massacres, the government investigated itself deflecting with confusing stories, demanding we all “move on” and let it go. http://bit.ly/1l2UIjm

For almost 50 years, we have watched American institutions, their lapdog media, law enforcement and the courts refuse accountability for massacres. With the 50th on May 4, 2020, they busily rewrite the ‘stories’ of Kent State transmiting their vision, censoring all other narratives as they invest in ‘their experts,’ documentaries, a museum, tour, exhibits and monument narratives. Read about the Allison tribute http://bit.ly/2zKXPYW

So what is their “official” story about Kent State? A confusing story about the Kent State shootings and how it was an “unfortunate incident.” No acknowledgement of wrongdoing, no expert investigation or credible research, no admittance of government involvement and certainly few amends made to all who were harmed. Yet despite their efforts to command us to “move on” without acknowledgement, truth continues to emerge.

In 2010, 40 years after Kent State, truth emerged in audio evidence from the May 4th massacre. A digital examination by international forensic expert Stuart Allen found game-changing new evidence in an audio recording of the May 4, 1970 Command-to-Fire yet Kent State University and the U.S. government refused the expert’s analyses and continue to ignore Allen’s findings. Why? It’s pretty simple. Allen’s findings isolated a Kent State “commands-to-fire” opening the door to issues around “command responsibility” and government complicity. We know that without proper investigation, there is no opportunity for amends to be made and there will be no healing. http://bit.ly/aM7Ocm and http://bit.ly/R4Ktio.

Back then young people knew we were all in this together, yet our government had other ideas and worked to splinter and divide our solidarity. Their tactics included scapegoating students and protesters by demonizing us, President Nixon called us “bums” days earlier and Nixon’s cronies called antiwar protesters communists. Even the FBI joined in by harassing us, infiltrating our groups, hunting us down, bringing only more trauma and loss. We were told the students deserved it (to be killed!) … and my family discovered how our government was attacking those who demanded Kent State accountability and truth.

After Allison’s funeral and grieving with my family that first week, I returned to ninth grade with teachers who shared “they should have shot more.” I remember my french teacher menacingly demanding I make up every test, every lesson for the week I missed. I was told to buck up and get over it. The teacher’s sentiments were echoed around school, in the news, at my parents’ jobs and just about everywhere we turned.

False narratives smeared my sister Allison in the newspapers and were discussed on the radio. According to their propaganda Allison was a loud-mouth protester, a slut and was pregnant with sexually transmitted disease and crabs. None of this was true except that she was a loud-mouth protester.

My father asked, “Is this a reason for killing her?”

According to the U.S. press, Allison was a young girl who deserved what she got, along with all her friends. Instead, Allison was a 19-yr-old, freshman honors student at Kent State University and with her friends, she was unarmed as she protested the Vietnam war when the government shot her dead.

News of the Kent State massacre exploded around the world, echoed in Russian Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem, “Flowers and Bullets” days later. http://bit.ly/2JIJqCm Yevtushenko’s poem memorializes Allison’s comment to an Ohio National Guardsman on May 3, 1970, “Flowers are better than bullets.”

More than four decades later at the United Nations, I learned that Allison had been target assassinated by the U.S. government, also known as extrajudicial execution, and that because she was protesting her government when they killed her, it is a human rights crime. Taking Kent State to the U.N. http://bit.ly/1KTBGsI

My father Arthur Krause took the issues of the Kent State massacre to the U.S. judicial system. I remember Dad wanted to “show young people how the court system worked,” that the truth about Kent State would come out in the courts through litigation. After nine years of expensive litigation, our family settled with all the other survivors. We received $15,000 and a statement of regret. Dad never got over it. Read the Kent State civil settlement statement http://bit.ly/1qd9tTO About Dad’s case http://bit.ly/2YATbbQ

It didn’t take long for me to see that American leadership has never wanted us to heal. When a human being experiences trauma, the person usually withdraws, finds it hard to connect with others and/or never takes real action to heal their wounds, especially the deepest. The U.S. government traumatizes the masses because we’re troubled and a heck of a lot easier to control.

By the time I was out of the house and in college at 17, I was searching for any way to heal. In 1975 going to therapy was not mainstream, very expensive and considered a weakness. It wasn’t until I flipped out that I finally got my parents’ attention. With my mother at the medical center as we considered moving me into an in-patient facility, the intake person shared that they didn’t use “shock treatments” unless it was necessary, helping me make my decision for out-patient therapy. That first experience in therapy helped me find my way in turning 20, a year older than Allison, but little else. For the next 30 years I attempted to heal my PTSD wounds with every therapy I could find. Nothing really made a difference.

It wasn’t until 2012, 42 years after Kent State, that I began to heal my Kent State wound. At an Occupy festival I was introduced to an EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprogramming) therapist and healed with her for more than three years. Even in the first session, I found relief and the healing built upon each therapy session. My wounds at Kent State were healed like never before. About my healing http://bit.ly/r5yvH; About EMDR http://bit.ly/2OLyyri

Suicide may be today’s response to trauma, PTSD and survivor’s guilt. I understand not being able to live with the pain. IT BREAKS MY HEART these three gun violence survivors have chosen suicide. When nothing changes and there is no healing, we may only assume suicides will increase. About Parkland http://bit.ly/2sJWiCp

I know that when we turn the horror and trauma in our lives into something beneficial, we heal.

Each day taking action for truth at Kent State and Jackson State, little by little, I heal my wounds, and hope the healing extends to the collective. Exposing institutional, buried truth heals the collective.

Survivors of Sandy Hook and Parkland deserve their healing … every human being deserves to heal. May we all heal!

Sculpture by Albert György

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Paul Krassner on the Kent State Truth Tribunal

Excerpted from Paul Krassner’s column, June 2010 issue of “High Times”

Allison Beth Krause

In my book, Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs: From Toad Slime to Ecstasy, Freddy Berthoff described his mescaline trip at a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young concert in the summer of 1970 when he was 15. “Earlier that spring,” he wrote, “the helmeted, rifle-toting National Guard came up over the rise during a peace-in-Vietnam rally at Kent State University. And opened fire on the crowd. I always suspected it was a contrived event, as if someone deep in the executive branch had said, ‘We’ve got to teach those commie punks a lesson.’” Actually, President Nixon had called antiwar protesters “bums” two days before the shootings. While Freddy was peaking on mescaline, CSNY sang a new song about the massacre:

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in O-hi-o…

Plus nine wounded. Sixty-seven shots – dum-dum bullets that exploded upon impact — had been fired in 13 seconds. This incident on May 4, 1970 resulted in the first general student strike in U.S. history, encompassing over 400 campuses.

Arthur Krause, father of one of the dead students, Allison, got a call from John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, who said, “There will be a complete investigation.” Krause responded, “Are you sure about that?” And the reply: “Mr. Krause, I promise you, there will be no whitewash.”

But NBC News correspondent James Polk discovered a memo marked “Eyes Only” from Ehrlichman to Attorney General John Mitchell ordering that there be no federal grand jury investigation of the killings, because Nixon adamantly opposed such action.

Polk reported that, “In 1973, under a new Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, the Justice Department reversed itself and did send the Kent State case to a federal grand jury. When that was announced, Richardson said to an aide he got a call from the White House. He was told that Richard Nixon was so upset, they had to scrape the president off the walls with a spatula.”

Last year, Allison Krause’s younger sister, Laurel, was relaxing on the front deck of her home in California when she saw the County Sheriff’s Deputy coming toward her, followed by nearly two dozen men.  “Then, before my eyes,” she recalls, “the officers morphed into a platoon of Ohio National Guardsmen marching onto my land. They were here because I was cultivating medical marijuana. I realized the persecution I was living through was similar to what many Americans and global citizens experience daily. This harassment even had parallels to Allison’s experience before she was murdered.”

What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

Now, 40 years later, Laurel, her mother and other Kent State activists have been organizing the “2010 Kent State Truth Tribunal” (see http://bit.ly/8AD8TQ) scheduled for May 1-4 on the campus where the slaughter of unarmed demonstrators originally occurred. The invitation to participate in sharing their personal narratives has been extended to 1970 protesters, witnesses, National Guardsmen, Ohio and federal government officials, university administrators and educators, local residents, families of the victims. The purpose is to uncover the truth.

Laurel was only 15 when the Kent State shootings took place. “Like any 15-year-old, my coping mechanisms were undeveloped at best. Every evening, I remember spending hours in my bedroom practicing calligraphy to Neil Young’s ‘After the Goldrush,’ artistically copying phrases of his music, smoking marijuana to calm and numb my pain.” When she was arrested for legally growing marijuana, “They cuffed me and read my rights as I sobbed hysterically. This was the first time I flashed back and revisited the utter shock, raw devastation and feeling of total loss since Allison died. I believed they were going to shoot and kill me, just like Allison. How ironic, I thought. The medicine that kept me safe from experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder now led me to relive that horrible experience as the cops marched onto my property.”

She began to see the interconnectedness of those events. The dehumanization of Allison was the logical, ultimate extension of the dehumanization of Laurel. Legally, two felonies were reduced to misdemeanors, and she was sentenced to 25 hours of community service. But a therapist, one of Allison’s friends from Kent State, suggested to Laurel that the best way to deal with the pain of PTSD was to make something good come out of the remembrance, the suffering and the pain. “That’s when I decided to transform the arrest into something good for me,” she says, “good for all. It was my only choice, the only solution to cure this memorable, generational, personal angst. My mantra became, ‘This is the best thing that ever happened to me.’ And it has been.” That’s why she’s fighting so hard for the truth to burst through cement like blades of grass.

***

The Kent State Truth Tribunal invites your participation, support and tax-deductible, charitable donations. If the Truth at 1970 Kent State matters to you, please learn more about us here.

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The Aftermath of Loss

Editor’s Note: To learn more about the Kent State Truth Tribunal, go to www.TruthTribunal.org. Please lend your support to our efforts for Truth & Justice.

A tribute to my sister, slain 1970 Kent State University student protestor against the Vietnam War, Allison Krause.

Becoming Galvanized by Laurel Krause & Delaney Rose Brown

Putting the finishing touches on my face, I looked in the mirror and had a funny feeling about the day ahead.  I saw a healthy, bright-eyed, intense 53 year old woman glancing back with excitement and dashes of hope and desirability in knowing a nice man had just called to ask me out on a date that afternoon.  I accepted the invitation and as I dashed around my place, I realized it had been a while.  It felt like today was going to be different and maybe extraordinary, perhaps even life-changing.

Feeling optimistic and energized, I walked outside onto my front deck to take in the warm, late morning California sunshine and the calming beauty of my view on the rural Mendocino coast.  I turned around to look at the sun and feel the winter mid-day rays shine on me.

Unsure if it was real or if I imagined it, I tried to focus my over-40 eyes; it looked like the lead Mendocino County Sheriff’s Deputy marching towards me from the gate.  Nearly two-dozen men followed behind like bees in a hive, some fiddling with the gate to take it off its track while others were coming through in vehicles and, most disturbingly, officers aggressively following the Deputy marching towards me.  It was hard to fathom why so many officers were coming at me and Manny, my small dog that Friday noon.

There I was, standing barefoot in a beautiful dress pretty with perfume, and all the grace of the day suddenly vanished.  I immediately felt raw with shock.

Grabbing the deck rail to steady myself, I moaned “Ohhhh shittttt!”

Then before my eyes, the officers morphed into a platoon of Ohio National Guardsmen marching onto my land through the gate.  A soundtrack played in my head and everything went fuzzy:

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,

We’re finally on our own.

This summer I hear the drumming,

Four dead in Ohio.

Gotta get down to it

Soldiers are gunning us down

Should have been done long ago.

What if you knew her

And found her dead on the ground

How can you run when you know?        –“Ohio,” Neil Young, CSN&Y

In that split-second, I was back at Kent State University in 1970 when the Ohio National Guard shot and killed my sister, Allison Krause, during the Vietnam War protests on campus.  My time was up, les jeux sont faits and now they were coming for me too.

This was the first time I flashed back and revisited the utter shock, raw devastation and feeling of total loss since Allison died.  Back in early May 1970, I remember hearing my first news of Allison from a neighbor as I arrived home from junior high that afternoon, “Allison has been hurt.”

As the emotions took over, I began to physically, mentally and spiritually re-feel the learning of my sister’s death at the doorsteps of our home.  I broke down and couldn’t maintain control of anything in our environment, myself included.  I watched the progression of events outside of myself, as a witness instead of really being there, and having this happen to my family and me.

Later in life I learned that I was born into this world, the child of Arthur and Doris Krause and little sister of Allison Krause, to integrate balance into my surroundings and live in harmony.  In following this life path, I have sometimes yielded to the signposts of life that pop up to offer guidance.  Other times I have shielded my view of them, denied them or ignored them altogether.  As I’ve aged, I have had this opportunity to come to terms with myself.

I’ve learned that until health, balance or resolution is achieved and harmony is found, the signposts only get stronger, or shall I say, fiercer…and they continue to revisit until the message is finally decoded and hopefully integrated.

Focusing on my breath, I buckled to the ground while painful emotions ran through me, returning me to the moment.  Here I was experiencing one heck of a signpost as the sheriff’s deputy steadied me on the deck of my home and flashed the search warrant in my face to snap me back to reality – they were here because I was cultivating medical marijuana.  They cuffed me and read my rights as I sobbed hysterically.  While the cops searched through everything in my home, I was arrested and taken to jail.

Whether I missed the date or stood him up that day, there was no doubt I blew it with my suitor.  But it was nonetheless true that this Friday in late February was personally unforgettable and life changing.  It wasn’t exactly the kind of day I had imagined earlier or would have even asked for, but sometimes we are simply receivers of environmental impact, having little control or power over circumstances.  As we navigate through key life situations, there are choices and decisions we must make and therein lies our power: how we manage and exert our essence.  The outcome of events largely depends on how we respond to the situation, hopefully by creating an opportunity for positive growth to take away from it.

Arriving back home that night to my ravished land, I found doors left open, the gate was thrown off its hinge and the inside of my home strewn with debris from the enforcement teams raiding my property. It was hard to believe that my land, a place I had personally toiled on and developed these past five years, felt so negated and exposed.  In the supposed safety of my beloved home, I was scared, ravaged and vulnerable.

It wasn’t until the second month following my bust that I put together the pieces and realized the telltale signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.  Even though the sheriff’s men didn’t pull their guns on me during the arrest, once I saw the guns in their holsters, I feared for my life.  As they marched onto my property, I believed they were going to shoot and kill me, just like Allison.

Back in that state of mind, I again felt the same pain I experienced losing Allison nearly forty years ago. This is how PTSD manifests. This was how I took care of myself back then, what I did at the onslaught of extreme loss on a personal and cosmic level.

Cricket, one of Allison’s friends from Kent State and a therapist, suggested one late night phone call after the bust that PTSD doesn’t ever go away.  She suggested that the best way to deal with the pain of PTSD was to make something good come out of the remembrance, the suffering and the pain.

That’s when I decided to make the bust something good for me, good for all.  It was my only choice, the only solution to cure this memorable, generational, personal angst.  My mantra became, “This is the best thing that ever happened to me.”

And it has been.

Recounting my bust six months hence, I continue to confuse my words.  I replace the sheriff’s deputies with national guardsmen.  At night in dreams I see the guardsmen marching through my gate in unison.  My bust triggered the post-traumatic stress I experienced from my sister being murdered at Kent State in 1970.  She was protesting against the Vietnam War, most specifically, the Cambodian Invasion along with Nixon’s verbal harassment of the protesting students, calling them ‘bums.’  My sister, Allison Beth Krause, was shot dead by the National Guard with dum-dum bullets that exploded upon impact, as she protested more than a football field away from her killers, the U.S. government.

Back in 1970 with my parents in the room where Allison laid lifeless, I watched from outside in the hospital hall.  I saw what used to be ‘her’ lying there.  I noticed that her spirit had already left, and everyone was a mess.  My parents identified her body and as we walked the halls in the hospital, we heard others murmur, “they should’ve shot more.”

Like any fifteen-year-old, my coping mechanisms were undeveloped at best.  Every evening, I remember spending hours in my bedroom practicing calligraphy to Neil Young’s ‘After the Goldrush’…artistically copying phrases of his music…smoking marijuana to calm and numb my pain.  Feebly attempting to come to terms with the loss of my sister, and like so many others, the loss of feeling safe in the United States.

Years later I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of what happened to Allison.  Over thirty years later to help alleviate the effects of this emotional disorder, which is commonly characterized by long-lasting problems with many aspects of emotional and social functioning, I began cultivating my own medicine, marijuana.

How ironic, I thought. The medicine that kept me safe from experiencing PTSD now led me to relive that horrible experience as the cops marched onto my property.  There was no getting away from it.  No matter how much medical marijuana I smoked, I couldn’t change the fact that my sister was killed and I had not healed from it. None of us had healed from it.

Right after my bust, I could barely put a sentence together, yet after a few days back home from jail, I got really mad.  As a medical marijuana caregiver/patient, I had the proper documents and made every effort to grow marijuana legally on my rural, gated property, and I ended up getting arrested.  How did this happen?

Two weeks later as I entered my ‘not guilty’ plea in court, I learned that the seeds of my bust were sown with nuisance complaints.  Mendocino County nuisance ordinances encourage anyone who doesn’t like his or her neighbors, to send anonymous letters to the Sheriff complaining of ‘foul odors’ and road traffic.  These anonymous letters are basically crafted templates to complain of fabricated nuisances…at least in my case.  Taking advantage of this ordinance, hateful residents in Mendocino County found a way to make trouble for their neighbors by criminalizing them, especially the newcomers to the community.

I moved to the Mendocino coast five years ago, when I purchased five acres of undeveloped land in a rural area next to an agricultural preserve.  It was the first and only property my real estate agent showed me in 2004, and there was no doubt this magical spot called me.  When I arrived, it felt as if I was summoned, and now it’s clear that Allison and Dad were those pulling forces.

I remember parking my car at the end of the dirt driveway and looking out, enchanted by the view and turning to ask my friend, “Is that the ocean?”  I knew it was.  I saw this awesome, remote landscape before me and was captivated by the beautiful ecosystem of life.  The rolling meadows extending miles to the sea with hawks soaring above the fields, searching for prey.  Mice sheltering in the grasses that feed the cows continually grazing as they wander their weekly path across vast acreage that I observe each day, intending to minimize my impact.

My neighbors however, did not share my enthusiasm for my active life here, and they quickly judged me as a ‘city slicker.’  I had somehow missed their angry sentiments when I decided to make my move to the coast.   But the fact remained that I had already sunk everything I had into creating this fantasy-come-true and with the the bust, I was thrown down an even deeper financial hole.  My dream was crashing in on me.

After my bust, sporadic harassment continued as neighbors pulled pranks, engaged in petty vandalism and pursued other childish haunting tricks.  As I watched with dread, I felt exposed, off-balanced…almost shameful.  Then I remembered the Kent State hate mail my family received for over a decade after Allison was killed. While there were many very supportive, loving people and notes that came forward, the hatefulness of those scribbled letters had tremendous resonance.  Over time, I learned that the letter writers’ issues and angst sent our way (and now at me again) had very little to do with us.  I now see it as a manifestation related to duality, polarization and prejudice…us v. them, conservative v. progressive, rich v. poor, powerful v. downtrodden.

The days following my bust crept by; I burrowed in and rarely left my land.  In an effort to heal, I opened myself up and dug deep into my essence, asking for divine guidance.  That Spring, I often created rituals at my firepit, beckoning for direction and instruction.  I was asking to hear how I could be of best service to all.  That was when I heard Allison and my Dad come forward.  They wanted me to get active…to do something important for them.

As I recovered, I noticed that I was decoding the signposts in my life easier and quicker than usual, with increased clarity.  I realized the persecution I was living through was similar to what many Americans and global citizens experience daily.  This harassment even had parallels to Allison’s experience before she was murdered at Kent State almost forty years ago.

I began to see the interconnectedness of these events.  Full circle, I saw how the enduring effects of Kent State continue impacting today through powerful reverberations  Unresolved energy and extreme disharmony of this magnitude continued to reappear, rerunning on similar themes from the past, becoming stronger and continuing to add more insult to injury until we make things right. It became clear that this is true on a personal level as well as in collective consciousness.

The universe had already begun to push me towards searching for the truth with the signposts and alarming events. I started to understand this wasn’t something I could simply run away from.  At a very deep level, there was unfinished business surrounding cause and effect of certain events in my life and I was encouraged to take a hard look at it.

One fateful day in early April, the telephone rang.  My friend Alan Canfora, a wounded student in the Kent State Massacre, called to invite me to speak at Kent State University’s 39th memorial event. Normally I don’t relish public speaking, yet I quickly accepted.

So I began tailoring a speech for the Kent State memorial with Delaney Brown, a young activist living in the area.  Through the process of writing Speaking Your Truth, we were compelled to learn more about the recently re-discovered audio tape that recorded the Kent State protest on May 4th, 1970.  On that day, a student placed a microphone outside his dorm room window to record the protests on campus.  A copy of a copy (at 4th or 5th generation), hidden away and unearthed from the Yale Library only two years ago in 2007, the original audio tape has never been studied, forensically examined or explored.  Listen to tape here.

Those among the community directly involved in the Kent State Massacre, agree this audio tape holds the key to unlocking the truth at Kent State.  This new information or ‘truth’ is critically important as it contains documented evidence of a recorded ‘Order to Shoot’ that has been continually denied.  With the discovery and proof of an order to shoot, we finally document the intent to kill and ultimately reveal the truth about what occurred.  This is the truth that was so long ago suppressed and denied as guardsman and government officials continually perjured their testimonies to support their cover-up.  The contents of this audio tape shall play a dramatic role in the history of the Kent State Massacre as well as our own individual, national and global perceptions of the event.

I realized I had to focus my energy on that tape and become involved in isolating the ‘Order to Shoot’ given by the Ohio National Guard, to finally learn the truth about Kent State.  As the Strubbe tape had never been explored or analyzed, I wanted to help make that happen and follow it down.

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