Greff Fabrics Blues, 1971 (xix)

After graduating from Kent State, my Greff Fabrics sample room co-worker had apparently moved to New York City with the Kent State woman student he had fallen in love with while they both attended Kent State. And following the Kent State Massacre, he seemed to have completely retreated from any further involvement in U.S. anti-war movement or New Left politics: Both because he seemed to realize from what he had witnessed at Kent State that personal involvement in anti-war U.S. protests in the 1970s could, in fact, get you killed in your 20's; and because he seemed to also feel some regret about having played a role in the destruction of the Kent State ROTC building, given how the ROTC building's destruction had been exploited as the pretext for the deadly Ohio National Guard attack on Kent State's students.

So after he was lucky enough to receive a draft lottery number that enabled him to no longer be at risk of being drafted into the U.S. military for 1970s military service in Vietnam, the Greff Fabrics co-worker who had attended Kent State in 1970, by the Fall of 1971, seemed completely divorced from any connection to the early 1970s anti-war counter-culture; and completely re-assimilated into the straight 9-to-5 world of work, where he soon moved away from Greff Fabrics and into a higher-paying straight corporate job that his woman friend's family connection had apparently reserved for him.

Greff Fabrics Blues, 1971 (xviii)

Before this Greff Fabrics co-worker told me about his involvement in destroying the Kent State ROTC building prior to the Kent State Massacre, I had considered it conceivable that the Kent State ROTC building's destruction might have just been the work of some government agent-provocateur, in order to create a pretext for ordering the Ohio National Guardsmen onto the Kent State University campus to carry out some kind of pre-planned "show the anti-war white middle-class students that the U.S. government is willing to kill them if they keep showing mass support for anti-war celebrity activists like Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and the other convicted Chicago 8 Conspiracy defendants" mission.

But after speaking to my Greff Fabrics co-worker, it now seemed that the destruction of the Kent State ROTC building a few nights prior to the Kent State Massacre had, indeed, been an authentic act of anti-war protest/resistance by a group of Kent State University anti-war students (although, of course, there's always the outside-but unlikely, perhaps, in this case-possibility that the anti-war student group at Kent State University that planned or carried out the destruction of the Kent State ROTC building may have been infiltrated by some student agent-provocateur).