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lostnfound

(16,138 posts)
Fri Apr 10, 2020, 11:23 AM Apr 2020

Chills on my spine as I listen to Simon & Garfunkel's version of Times They Are Changing

When my son was a little boy maybe eight years old, he looked at me one day and said mom “why do we do all of this stuff?” What do you mean? “All the stuff. Everybody is always doing stuff,” he said. “Work, school, activities.”

I’m not much of a extrovert. I tend to prefer being at home with a good book going for a walk with a friend, especially with my little boy at the time. But he was in a close-knit school where they were constant social activities and sports. Maybe it was a sudden change for him, even though he really enjoyed it. Maybe it was the switch from Montessori of kindergarten to traditional school and second grade. He’s been a deep thinker though, since the day he was born, so we could easily have been commentary on the whole culture, as he knew it.

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
The battle outside ragin'
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'

Fast forward 10 or 12 years, we parents are older now. We all live apart, father mother son. Dad in his own house in a hot city. Son in his own apartment in a cold city. And me, my home office overlooks a small lake and 1 billion fluttering glowing green leaves out my office window with towering trees that form a swaying arch in what I call the Tree Cathedral.

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'

The busy frantic culture, where we are all “doing stuff”, has hit a brick wall. It’s hard to think of any element of our life that is untouched. And we don’t know what will be on the other side, how long it will take to get there. Mamy old ones are dying off, many hearts breaking at the loss. Reminds me of an REM lyric, “old man don’t lay so still, you’re not yet younger, it’s time to teach.” i don’t want them to leave, these beautiful bridges to the past.

So it strikes me as harsh to see the next lyric, to the Bob Dylan song.

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'

The curse has indeed been cast. A change in the world’s order is coming soon, unless a miraculous vaccine arrives much sooner. The thoughtful twenty-somethings that I know carry some desires for change and under the burdens of student debt and limited opportunities. The music I listened to when I was young, which I sadly did NOT pass on to my son, spoke about the culture changing. Surely the young generation today must be chomping at the bit for a cultural change. Who could blame them? Maybe we are arriving at the beginning of a new world, whether it be drones and surveillance, or grounded more ”local” lives with more humanity, or who knows what they will create?

For now, this moment in history is painful, like childbirth, and momentous, like the birth of a new child, and more than a little scary. Good luck, dear next generation. We wish you well. When you get bored, take a listen to some of that 60s music. Godspeed.

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Chills on my spine as I listen to Simon & Garfunkel's version of Times They Are Changing (Original Post) lostnfound Apr 2020 OP
You don't have a link in youtube? at140 Apr 2020 #1
Dylan 1964 quaint Apr 2020 #2
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