Memories of Nursery School at the Time of Kent State
We need the love and empathy of Prince in Minnesota and everywhere
“Honey, I know, I know, times are changin’; it’s time we all reach out for something new, that means you, too.”
So sang Prince, the late, great artist and Minnesotan, years ago on the album and title song, “Purple Rain,” an ethereal number.
Yes, Prince was right that times are changin,’ as his fellow Minnesotan, Bobby Dylan, famously sang in the 1960s.
And Prince was also right that we all need to “reach out for something new,” if we are to reduce violence and improve the world.
Prince might not have been singing of this current moment, but he was a prophet, and his words still ring true.
All of us know the difference between right and wrong.
We are all flawed. And we are all capable of redemption.
But some people never reconfigure their lives.
Some people, who were sadists when they were young, remain sadists into adulthood.
And some people, who were violent when they were kids, stay violent.
I was thinking about all of this after today’s tragic killing of Alex Jeffrey Pretti by federal agents.
As we all know, an ICE agent killed Renee Good a few weeks ago, on Jan. 7. And, today, federal agents killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an ICU nurse at a veterans’ hospital.
Both Ms. Good, who was a poet, and Mr. Pretti were American citizens, and neither one had a criminal record, according to reports.
Yet they have been defamed, on the one hand, as a domestic terrorist, and, on the other, as a gun-wielding threat to law enforcement.
They were murdered in cold blood in Minneapolis, Minn., a city and state not known for violence. In fact, Prince, the late musician, used to live in Minnesota, because he said, if memory serves, that the bad people did not come up there to his state, in the north country, where the temperature tends to be cold.
It is clear from the videos that neither Ms. Good nor Mr. Pretti was even remotely a threat to anyone, yet they were killed.
Before she was shot, Ms. Good was trying to drive her car out of the way of ICE officials. And Mr. Pretti was manhandled and thrown to the ground by numerous federal agents, before he was murdered.
It is legal to carry a firearm in the state of Minnesota, and Mr. Pretti, who reportedly was carrying a gun, had a permit to do so.
I am not the first person, who has reflected in the past few weeks on the Kent State massacre in 1970.
What I recall about that massacre in 1970 is not the massacre itself, when National Guardsmen shot and killed four students and wounded nine others at Kent State University in Ohio.
My parents shielded me from violent images on TV when I was a little boy, so I did not view footage of the shooting until years later.
Instead, what I recall about that massacre was the cruelty, the lack of empathy of one of my nursery school classmates, who in Trumpian fashion said something along the lines of, “They deserved it.”
It is true that many children do not have the same level of empathy that some adults have, which could be to an extent because, from a neurological perspective, the brains of children have not developed fully.
It is also true, as I wrote at the outset, that all kids, like all adults, know the difference between right and wrong.
As opposed to the kindness and nonviolence of Prince and Renee Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti, beautiful souls, this nursery school classmate of mine, whom I will call Bad Ham, was a violent person and a sadist.
I had another nursery school classmate, a nice guy, named Andy, and for a period of time, the three of us, Bad Ham, Andy and I attended birthday parties at the others’ homes.
But I became friends only with Andy.
We used to watch Hanna-Barbera cartoons at Andy’s house, and we played touch football in his backyard.
Andy and I had some good times.
As for Bad Ham, we lived fairly close to each other, which may be why he initially wanted to be friends with me.
But on one of the first days of nursery school, he mocked an older boy, who was in our class, and told me not to hang around with him because he had repeated nursery school.
As it turned out, this lack of empathy, this cruelty, was typical of Bad Ham. It was a character trait, and he never seemed to grow out of it.
As I have already pointed out, Bad Ham made fun of the victims of the Kent State massacre.
And a few weeks before that massacre, Bad Ham denigrated Earth Day, ridiculed it as a wimpy joke, even though he claimed to admire astronauts, who had taken the first photos from space of our big, blue marble in the late 1960s.
President John Kennedy had, of course, inspired the whole nation with his goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. And indeed, a few months before I entered nursery school in the fall of 1969, the astronauts did land on the moon.
In spite of the wonder and the awe that all of us had at watching the astronauts, and in spite of the divine beauty of our planet, as viewed from space, Bad Ham, as I say, bashed Earth Day.
But his sadism and lack of empathy were not limited to events that year, in 1970.
Bad Ham liked to play with guns. In fact, he had a gun at his house, which was on the other side of Whitney Avenue in the suburbs of New Haven, Conn.
His father had taught him how to use a gun.
We had no guns in my house.
And my father warned me about them.
My dad once cautioned me that, if anyone ever said, “let’s play around with a gun,” I should say, “No.”
Perhaps, not surprisingly, Bad Ham did invite me to play with a gun at his house, an invitation that I declined.
He mocked me at his birthday party because he thought that my gift was a wimpy one, and he even pulled Andy, my buddy, away from me, while all the other kids laughed at my expense.
Bad Ham also mocked another friend of mine, who had lost his father, a war hero, in Vietnam.
And when I was in third grade, Bad Ham passed word around that he and three of his friends from Mars, an open classroom, named after the planet, at my public school, were all going to beat me up.
I should point out, that, even though Bad Ham was twice my size (I was the smallest boy in my class for years), he still needed to enlist three other kids, all of whom were also bigger than I, to gang up on me.
To protect myself, I told a couple of my classmates, who lived on the same block as Bad Ham, one of whom had an older brother, who was very tough, and the other of whom was my friend, whose father had passed away in Vietnam.
My friend, whose father was a hero, had character, as did our classmate, who told her older brother.
They saved me from a vicious assault after school.
While I was never actually threatened with a gun, and while I was not beaten up, there is no doubt in my mind that Bad Ham intended to harm me, to savage me, with the help of his three cohorts or with a gun.
Bad Ham’s behavior was very Trumpian.
As we will recall, Trump mocked John McCain, a war hero, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and denigrated his service.
And, as was reported several years ago, Trump, in the presence of General John Kelly, diminished the service of the veterans buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Like Trump, Bad Ham was a tall kid, maybe even a bit of a pretty boy.
But he had no character, like Trump and like some members of ICE and other federal agents, who have behaved with no humanity, no restraint, and no empathy, in attacking people in the streets of our country, manhandling, pepper-spraying and beating them, and killing Renee Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti.
For the record, I am opposed to guns; and I have never owned one.
Of course, Mr. Pretti had a legal permit to carry a firearm in Minnesota. And from video footage, he was holding his phone, not a gun, when he was approached by federal agents.
Again, as I pointed out earlier, he was murdered in cold blood, as was Renee Good, not because Mr. Pretti or Ms. Good did anything that was even remotely threatening.
No, Mr. Pretti and Ms. Good were murdered in cold blood because Trump and his lackeys have given violent people, including members of ICE and other federal agents, cover to commit acts of evil.
Unlike Prince, whose ethereal music calls for reaching out “for something new,” something peaceful and filled with love, Trump, who has no poetry in his soul, has made it very clear that he condones violence and welcomes it.
“Rough ‘em up, rough ‘em up,” Trump said years ago to his supporters, indicating that he would pay their legal bills, if they beat up those who were protesting Trump and his policies.
It is worth repeating that Trump set the tone for his role in public life, when he declared in his first campaign for office, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody,” and still not lose any votes.
As I have written for years, Trump exudes violence in his speech, thoughts and actions.
He may not have pulled the trigger in Minnesota today or a few weeks ago, on Jan. 7, and he may not have pinned his knee to the back of George Floyd’s neck in May 2020, but Trump bears much of the responsibility for the violence in our society today.
Unlike my friend’s father, who was a war hero in Vietnam, Trump ducked the draft and has ducked responsibility for these murders in Minnesota and killings elsewhere.
We must do a much better job of vetting officers, agents, or anyone, for that matter, who carries a gun, to help us weed out sociopaths.
And it goes without saying that we need to change the leadership in the White House and Congress, so that we don’t have the most malignant of sociopaths running the country with the support of some Republican enablers.
Prince was right that Minnesota is generally a peaceful place, but Trump and his lackeys have invaded this beautiful state with ICE and other federal agents, whose bullying, cowardice and violence evoke that of Trump and Bad Ham, who did not seem to gain an ounce of empathy as he grew up. But he has a chance to atone.
I hope that Bad Ham and other sadists from years ago and today do redeem themselves.
They need to do so for the sake of their souls.
We are not likely to see Trump and his ilk in Hanna-Barbera’s Jetsonian universe or dancing in the purple rain with Prince above our big, blue marble.