My sleek new cell phone arrived and sat on my office desk. To test the sound quality of its speakers, I played Phil Ochs’ “Changes.” This 21st century device magically, on demand played music which transmitted me half way across the country and a half a century ago to college where I met my wife and where we “made out” to this song.
Phil Ochs was the most gentle of the protest singer song writers of the 1960s. His songs were about justice and injustice, about protesting a war which was unwise and like Changes about love.
It was a time of intensity. Fear and despair over having to kill or be killed in Vietnam brought us out into the streets. But it was also a time of hope. While the struggle for civil rights would continue, there was already the signs that the country was changing. We believed, naively as it turned out, that racism was an “old person’s disease” and that it would die out as time passed.
Phil Och’s “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” and Buffy St. Marie’s “Universal Soldier” were the soundtrack to our resistance against the war. We boarded buses from all over the Midwest and rode hours to be in the marches in New York and Washington to lend our bodies and our energy in opposition to an unjust and unnecessary war. And we thought we won, when Lyndon Johnson, the President of the United States and the most powerful man in the world announced he would not be seeking re-election after barely beating Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary.
We had not yet heard the terms Red States and Blue States, but the country was deeply divided. The division was between the old and the young, and we “knew” that in the end, youth must be served. When the war ended, we expected the Great Society to continue expanding assuring every American to his or her birthright to justice and economic security.
We read in Time magazine the first mention of the term "Global Warning", but it was a distant concept and not an existential danger. Ronald Reagan was the washed up actor who somehow got himself elected as governor of California. And a tea party was something our grandmothers had in the afternoon.
Later that day I was on my bicycle and I began to sing Changes to myself. I began to cry. I cried with joy because how beautiful it was to ride a bike in Washington County in the spring. I cried because I still was in love and was loved with that young women from college. But, I cried most of all because young people today have their own songs, their own struggles, and my certainty that in fifty years when they hear those songs they too will know how short and wonderful this dance called life passes.