Yesterday's blog post cited to one of John Lennon's songs. Here's another blog posting with a Beatles reference. I have been thinking about an assertion made in that Beatles' song, "Revolution," a song I featured in my blog posting on May 21, 2024. The lyrics claim that "we all wanna change the world."
That Beatles' song dates from August 1968, and presuming that The Beatles were right, fifty-six years ago - and I do think they more or less caught the spirit of the time - here's the question I have today: Do we still want to to "Change The World"?
I am raising my own hand, to indicate my willingness, but as I have been thinking about it, I am not so sure that I am in the majority, or that I am even very representative of what lots of people think.
Maybe, today, most of us are just hoping to "hold on to what we've got."
Paul Simon has a song for that: "Slip Sliding Away." The complete lyrics for Simon's song are available right here, if you click that link. Click below to listen to Simon sing his song:
Since I am a father (and I wasn't, yet, in 1968, though I was by 1977, which is when Simon's song was recorded), I identify most closely with the following verse. It literally brings tears to my eyes, and I think it's kind of heart-rending. Maybe you'll agree:
I know a father
Who had a son
He longed to tell him all the reasons
For the things he'd done
He came a long way
Just to explain
He kissed his boy as he lay sleeping
Then he turned around and headed home again
He's slip slidin'
Slip slidin' away
You know the nearer your destination
The more you're slip slidin' away
If you are feeling something of that Paul Simon nostalgic despair, and that we are "Slip Slidin' Away" - if you don't really identify with the raucous lyrics and the music of that Beatles' song, "Revolution" - I have to say, thinking about the world today, that such feelings are totally understandable.
Still, if it is possible to put feelings aside, for long enough to think about it - it is actually pretty obvious that our past errors and omissions, those "reasons for the things we've done," don't contradict the perpetual fact of our real inheritance, which is not the "past," but "possibility."
I have to confess that I am not feeling much of the exhuberance of "Revolution," these days, in the Beatles' rendition, but I actually do understand a truth, to which Hannah Arendt was devoted, which is what I come back to when I think about that Beatles song. We, collectively - and each one of us, individually - always have the opportunity to do something new, something no one has ever thought about or ever done before. To follow up on that thought, you might revisit my blog posting on Lyndsey Stonebridge, whose recent book is called, We Are Free To Change The World.
If I were writing a song today, I think that's what I would call it:
We Are Free To Change The World
Let's all sing along!
We are the World🙏
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