Aging & Wisdom Quote by William Kunstler

“At first blush” is a lawyer’s throat-clear and a trapdoor. Kunstler, who made a career out of defending the reviled and exposing the state’s double standards, opens by granting the reader a grim, almost commonsense verdict: dead kids, dead dream. The phrasing is intentionally provisional, a feint toward the kind of fatalism official narratives depend on after political violence. If the dream “died with them,” then the shooting becomes an endpoint rather than an indictment.

The sentence also performs a brutal reframing of martyr language. “Gave up their lives” sounds voluntary, noble; “shot down in the parking lot” is blunt, industrial, humiliating. Parking lot and “the base of Blanket Hill” strip away the grandeur that institutions often paste onto tragedy. This wasn’t a battlefield. It was an everyday, low-rent space where power met dissent and chose force. By insisting on the mundane geography, Kunstler makes the violence feel less like history and more like policy.

Context matters: Kunstler is writing from the long shadow of Vietnam-era protest and state repression, when official reports often sought to convert bloodshed into “unfortunate incidents.” His intent is to deny that closure. The “at first blush” tells you the story you’re supposed to accept; the rest of his argument, implied here, is that this is the first lie. The dream didn’t die because it was naive. It’s declared dead so no one has to ask who killed it, and why.