“I wonder if they’re still there?” I thought as I drove to my janitorial job at the school. Rumors had been circulating that the governor planned to take action against the protest on the University of Denver campus. Students had built a makeshift tent village they called Woodstock West, gathering in outrage over the Kent State shootings on May 4th.
I had walked through the campus that weekend, listening to music and protest speakers, still trying to absorb the shock that U.S. National Guard troops had actually fired into a crowd of college students. Thirteen seconds of gunfire. Thirteen victims. Nine wounded. Four killed. All of them protesting the Vietnam War.
I was in my final weeks of high school that spring of 1970 — only a year younger than many of the Ohio victims. Now a similar protest was unfolding just blocks from my home and school, bringing the movement out of the news and into my own neighborhood.
Even though driving past DU was a few blocks out of my way, I decided to swing by and see whether the 1,500 students were still camped out. As I came up Evans Boulevard, the tents were still scattered across the lawn, and the 6:00 a.m. dawn was quiet.
I turned down University Boulevard toward the high school. Passing a police substation, I saw National Guard troops gathering in full riot gear. The rumors were true — the governor was preparing to act.
An hour later, after finishing my morning shift preparing classrooms, I jumped back into my car and returned to the DU campus. This time, nothing was quiet. Traffic had stopped. Students were running between cars, trying to escape the campus. As I crept forward, I saw smoke rising from the area where the tents had been.
Suddenly, I was in the middle of it. Students darted around my car as I sat trapped, unable to move. Right behind them came police and guardsmen in riot gear, weapons drawn, chasing the fleeing crowd. One soldier stopped at my car, rested his weapon across the hood, and fired a tear‑gas canister over my windshield.
That was the moment the political protests became real to me. The bubble that had kept me from paying much attention split open, and I felt the first cracks in the wall of my own understanding. I didn’t have the language for it then, but something in me shifted as I faced a new reality head‑on.
The Reflection
In Part II, I wrote about the idea of Them — the people we place on the other side of an invisible line, often without realizing we’ve drawn it. For most of my youth, Them was an abstract idea, a vague category shaped by the bubble I lived in. Protesters, activists, dissenters, people of color — they were people I heard about, not people I understood.
But that morning at the University of Denver, as students ran past my car and tear gas drifted across the lawn, Them suddenly had faces. They were my age. They were frightened. They were passionate. They were human. And the wall that had separated us from them began to crack.
I didn’t become enlightened in a single moment. I didn’t suddenly understand the war, the protests, or the pain that fueled them. But something shifted. The certainty I had grown up with no longer felt solid. The world was more complicated than I had imagined, and the people I had once seen as “other” were no longer so distant.
These were the first cracks in the wall — small, but undeniable. And once they appeared, I couldn’t unsee them. They invited me to look again at the assumptions I carried, the symbols I accepted, and the stories I had never questioned.
Part IV of this series will explore what happens when those walls aren’t just personal, but collective — when entire groups build identities around us and them, and when leaders use those divisions to ignite passion, loyalty, and sometimes destruction. But before we go there, it’s important to remember where the cracks began: in the quiet, awkward moments when the world stopped matching the story I had been told.