Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming

Dan Canon
4 min readApr 27, 2024

It is rarely a good idea to deploy soldiers to college campuses. This is so even (or perhaps especially) if those soldiers are wearing state police uniforms instead of combat fatigues. We should know this from the infamous example of the Kent State massacre, in which four students were killed for protesting the slaughter in Vietnam. Their names and legacies have become dimmer with the passage of time, but here they are:

Alison Krause, age 19

Jeffrey Glenn Miller, age 20

Sandra Lee Scheuer, age 20

William Knox Schroeder, age 19

We’re finally on our own

It seems authoritarians are incapable of learning from history. So once again, troops are being deployed to college campuses all over the country to address the growing menace of anti-war protests. Here in corn country, at least 33 students and three faculty members at Indiana University have been arrested as of this writing. Many of them have been banned from campus for “trespassing” at their own public institution. GOP ghouls are desperate to send the National Guard. It’s like 1970 all over again.

This summer I hear the drumming

Four dead in Ohio

And two more at Jackson State College in Mississippi, just ten days after Kent State:

Lafayette Gibbs, age 21

James Earl Green, age 17

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Dan Canon
Dan Canon

Written by Dan Canon

Civil rights lawyer, law professor, and high school dropout. Writes about the Midwest, class struggle, and the untold horrors of the legal system.

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