Cotton and Hawley Seek to Send Military to Campus

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

US Senators Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley, both Republicans, are calling on President Biden to federalize the National Guard under the Insurrection Act and send those troops to Columbia University in New York City to deal with student unrest.   Tom Cotton, a senator from Arkansas, tweeted on X:

"If Eric Adams (the mayor of New York City) won't send the NYPD and Kathy Hochul (the governor of New York) won't send the National Guard, Joe Biden has a duty to take charge and break up these mobs."

"Mobs," Tom?  So far it's all been peaceful, including the one hundred student arrests that happened when the NYPD were already called in earlier this week.  If you want to see what an actual mob looks like, Tom, visit the Springdale (Arkansas) Walmart on Black Friday!

Using military force to control peaceful demonstrators is not a good idea, Tom.  It was also a bad idea four years ago when you suggested the same thing in a New York Times editorial as a means of dealing with people who were demonstrating against the police execution of George Floyd.  Is your answer to all domestic discord to bring in the military?  Are you a one-trick pony, Tom?  A flagrant fascist?

Josh Hawley, a senator from Missouri who pays his property taxes to Virginia - and is also known for being a world-class sprinter - harkened back to the days of Eisenhower with his own tweet on X:

"Eisenhower sent the 101st to Little Rock.  It's time for Biden to call out the National Guard at our universities to protect Jewish Americans."

Josh, you do know that there are Jewish groups and Jewish students actually supporting the current wave of student protests, don't you?  And they are all protesting in a peaceful manner.  Do we really need - or want - a military response to peaceful demonstrations?

A better and far more appropriate use of the military would have been for Trump to have called them in to quell the havoc, destruction, injury, and death that the insurrectionists and anarchists loosed on the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021.  Of course, Josh, you might have had a problem with the military responding to that non-peaceful demonstration - since you were outside with your fist in the air egging  the rioters on!  Your hypocrisy is matched only by your abject cowardice!

Run, Josh, run!

How would a military intervention impact what is happening on American campuses?  History would suggest that the result could be tragic.

Ohio Governor James A. Rhodes, a Republican, called in the National Guard in early May of 1970 to deal with demonstrators at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, after the ROTC building had been set on fire.  (Tensions had recently escalated when Nixon announced that he had expanded the Vietnam War into Cambodia.)  Many of the guardsmen who were brought in to contain the demonstrators were no older than the students they were trying to face down, and the young guardsmen were undoubtedly scared and not emotionally prepared for the situation into which they had been thrust.  On May 4th, 1970, national guardsmen fired into a student demonstration and panic ensued.  Four students were shot and killed and nine others wounded.

That's history, that happened.  We do not need or want it repeated at Columbia, NYU, Yale, MIT, Harvard, Berkley, or Missouri State.  We've been there and done that.    Never again!

If students are protesting and demonstrating, let's figure out why and address that.  If the  demonstrations are spreading from campus to campus, as these appear to be doing, then their causes should be a matter for national attention and discussion.  That would probably get the demonstrators back in their classrooms quicker and more safely than any police or military action ever could.

There are some very bright young people who are trying to tell us something - and we need to be listening!