Tin Soldiers: Fifty Years On

If you are old enough, you will recognize that snippet from a song by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.  If not, I am here to tell you that on May 4, 1970, four students were shot to death by members of the Ohio National Guard on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio.  Nine others were wounded.

The students weren’t doing anything wrong. Actually, they were doing something right. They were peacefully assembled to protest the U.S. war on Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia.  They were part of an eruption of nationwide campus protests that followed President Nixon’s announcement that the United States had launched a bombing offensive of Cambodia.--FJ

I was a brainwashed freshman at Southern Oregon College on May 4, 1970.  But like the author's fence-sitting friends, I was jolted awake by what happened at Kent State.

Even I could see then that the Kent State Massacre was an atrocious exercise in corrupt power.  I was a frosh, a kid from the sticks of Oregon, devoid of anything like an actual education.  But there I was in college, just aware enough regarding the war to realize I wanted no part of it.

My logic was self-serving.  Like Ali, I didn't "have nothing against no Viet Cong."

Ali was the best teacher to my ears.  His words would cost him the best years of his career. He was brave.  The Ohio National Guard gunmen were cowards; our police apparatus in its burgeoning form has grown bolder and increasingly violent over the ensuing 50-years.

Things have only worsened since then.  Remember that Eric Garner couldn't breathe.  His killer could not have given a fuck.

His killer was fired 5-years after the murderous encounter, but he avoided guilt or jail, like the tin soldiers of the Ohio National Guard.


TS