A couple of mornings ago, I was on my stationary bike, going nowhere in a hurry. After being forced to give up running, following four plus decades and an angry leg, I snug on earphones and listen to my music. My head is filled with sound and my body seems to disappear, completely inhabited by the music. Some time during the ride, Dylan lodged between my ears, singing, The Times They Are A Changin’.
I have been listening to this musical magician forever, but this time, I got drawn into the lyrics. It seemed like a warning knell to the people in charge, foreseeing a time when their power would be vanquished by a new guard of young people. He wrote it in 1965, when I was around twenty and it was meant for people like me to understand.
Young people came alive in the Sixties, actually believing that they could change the course of world events. They were instrumental in ending an unjust war and caused a President to not seek re-election, unheard of in the halls of power and unimaginable for a man like Johnson, who coveted that office.
However naive it may have been at the time, there was a feeling of the limitless
influence of flower power. Love was going to rule the world. Well, it was a moment in history, which caught the old guard completely off their guard. The soundtrack of that era was mind blowing and it even blew some minds, but that’s not part of this story. Young people owned that music and in a way, it owned them as well. It was important to hear Dylan, the Stones, the Beatles and too many greats to list, sounds that flooded the landscape and empowered its audience.
A few days before my daily ride to nowhere, I read that by 2030, the world and all its inhabitants, people, animals and plants, will be in a climate tail spin with dire consequences, kind of like a fail safe machine set in motion and virtually impossible to stop. Like many of you, I have been following the terrifying predictions regarding climate change and wondering why it is not the most important story ever.
I understand why corporate media is not covering climate change and it is for the same reason that the vast majority of our elected officials are ignoring it as well. The mega polluters have all the money and they sleep with the news coverage and line the pockets of our politicians. The degree of urgency is buried by the bucks, but it really isn’t hard to find this story, if you give a shit.
There are a few things I don’t understand. Virtually the entire scientific community has been sounding the alarm for a number of years. There are so many credible news sources, where this information is readily available. The outrage is missing, like Prozac has been put in our water supply. We are on the verge of a catastrophe and you’d never know it by our behavior. Our own President, God bless him, just made yet another stupid joke and this one is about how inconvenient paper straws are and he will now sell plastic straws through his reelection apparatus and nobody cares on two levels. He laughs at the climate crisis and thinks nothing of lining his pockets to contribute to it.
So, there I am on my stationary bike, absorbed by the potent message of Dylan’s lyrics and I am wondering where the hell is today’s music. Where are the huge concerts to fund organizations dedicated to saving our planet and the lives of our children? Why are the streets empty? Young people made the Sixties happen and their children and grandchildren are pre-occupied by technology and epidemic, peer paralysis.
Listen, I have no illusions about that time and how it fizzled and cut its hair and put on suits. However, for a handful of years, optimism and possibility were on the minds and in the hearts of many people. The world got corporatized pretty damn quickly, because fear of free will scared the shit out of the money and they got busy. Music got lobotomized by the dollar, too. The voices of my generation are now limping around the stages of the world, off spring sometimes replacing their dead, parental music makers.
We may have to wait for today’s children to get angry enough over the world they’ll be inheriting from those of us who have more important things on our mind than the future of life as we know it. Somewhere, there is a ten year old Dylan, already strumming a guitar and watching the old man on You Tube, singing The Times They Are A Changing’. Right now, money and misdirection may be winning the war, but Nature is far more powerful and her voice will be heard, because the times are changing, however slowly. I have to believe that.
The Times They Are A-Changin’
WRITTEN BY: BOB DYLAN
Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’