It's Just a Matter of Time (Veterans Day 2025)

The song's been running through my head a lot lately. I'm singing it in the shower. One of the signal songs, about one of the signal events, of my generation.

Tin soldiers and Nixon's comin'
We're finally on our own
This summer I hear the drummin' 
Four dead in Ohio

May 1970. Kent State University. Four students, just kids, protesting the Vietnam War. Yes, some rocks were hurled, but the students were unarmed. They thought the Guards were firing blanks. They weren't. Four dead in Ohio. 

Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are gunning us down

A couple of weeks later, two kids were killed at Jackson State. State troopers this time, not Guards.

It was a scary time. 

I wasn't hurling rocks. But I was marching. And shouting. And riding the bus to DC to make sure my voice was heard.

I'd be very surprised if it happened on college campuses this time. But it's coming. Trump. Vance. Hegseth. Bondi. Miller. Homans. Noem. They want it. Blood. Lots of it. 

Maybe some nihilistic moron will fire on ICE and give them the excuse they're salivating for. Maybe it'll be nothing more than a priest in Chicago getting in the wrong guy's face, a Barney cosplayer in "war-ravaged" Portland making a little too much fun of some thin-skinned thug. Maybe an LA protestor will hurl a taco their way. Maybe it'll be a car backfiring. 

It probably won't happen in Boston. I know we're on the list, but there are still a few cities ahead of us. 

But it's retribution time, baby, and there's a lot of trigger fingers out there hoping for a reason to fire away.

It's Veterans Day, a holiday of sorts. I've written about it in the past. Here's one of my early Veterans Day posts, from the wayback of November 2008. When we weren't at each others throats. When the country was in an economic mess, but not an existential crisis. When we'd just elected our first Black president - and I was thrilled. (Election night was warm, and we had our windows open. My husband and I were sitting in the living room with our friend Joe, waiting for the election to be called. At 11 p.m., it was. We started cheering, and we could hear people throughout the neighborhood cheering as well. There were carhorns blaring away on Charles Street. It was a kinder, gentler time.)

Stephen Stills had a point, but I don't think that members of the National Guard are tin soldiers. They want to serve their country. They're patriotic. They want to earn some extra dough. They want the benefits. They want to get out of the house. They love what they do.

And what they do should not involve being sent into another state, where they are neither needed nor wanted. Where government officials, and Fox, and Sinclair News, have propagandized them into thinking that folks who live in blue cities, in blue states, are the enemy. That our cities are full of violence, that they're war ravaged. For sure, we have crime, and addicts, and homelessness, but let me assure you - and I'm speaking for Boston here, but assuming it's much the same for all the cities on Trump's enemies list - tourists are jamming the streets on nice fall weekends because - get this - even people who live in suburbs love visiting cities. 

I feel bad for these National Guards members. 

They really didn't sign up for patrolling our cities, for attacking their fellow citizens as the enemy.  (We have met the enemy and they is us? Alrighty.)

But if the rhetoric, the confrontations, the brutal treatment of immigrants, the roughing up of protestors, the attacks on the press, the rapelling-down-the-sides-of-buildings-and-zip-tying-kiddos-in-the-middle-of-the-night keep up (and I realize those rapellers weren't National Guards, and that the violence directed at protestors, the press, and anyone suspected of being an immigrant, i.e., existing while Black or brown, is mostly coming from ICE), something's going to happen.

It's just a matter of time.

Is it any wonder that I'm singing Ohio in the shower?

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