By A. Daniel Bodine
desertmountaintimes.com
“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'.”
– Bob Dylan's “The Times They Are A-Changin',” 1963
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Hee, hee. I didn't waste my case of Diet Cokes over the weekend. The world didn't end Saturday, like Harold Camping, 89, a well-publicized radio evangelist from California said it would. Tons of publicity he stirred up, he did. I was thinking about that while in the cashier's line at the Vista Mart on the east side in El Paso Friday evening.
“Damn!” I thought. “Noemi's really going to get mad at me if the world ends tomorrow and I've wasted money on these Cokes!”
But it didn't. Only a big yawn, for most people. With the exception of a few inner-circle close friends. And a few thousand other listeners around the globe, who were hedging their bets no doubt. Even a secretary at his radio station admitted she'd planned on coming back to work Monday.
So if you think changed mores of the last half century touch on no more than hair styles, tattoos and skirt lengths, wake up you damn ol' fool and look at a truly different world!
Indeed, we are changed now, Mr. Preacherman. With more winds still coming, apparently. Especially in our economy, and the ways we pit it against our environment. So slack off from this scary rhetoric you're spewing out, or face even more ostracism and humiliation, is a good message to put on all of it.
With negative publicity such as what a world-famous British physicist, Stephen Hawking, 60, (who was diagnosed with a paralyzing motor neuron disease at 21 and has struggled ever since) has kicked up as a non-believer--by arguing there can't possibly be such a thing as heaven, for instance--you'd think ministers like Camping would be putting in more time truly studying these modern arguments and calming his listeners against them.
Churches once taught "Hold tight onto the Good!"
Countering their “facts” with spiritual stories on God's love and eternal salvation, a Goodness, which Christ's message has always represented, needs to be racheted up as a new focus. Reasons to live Life fruitful and in good spirits. Science and religion are two different metaphysical world; are topics which have never gone well together. Fear, on the other hand, is a well-beaten horse today. It's turning people away from the church more and more.
Boyhood friend and longtime noted biblical researcher Jim Myers, from a ways south of Fort Worth for instance, on his Biblical Heritage Center blog (here and here), had some excellent comments on Mr. Preacherman. Besides the fact that he's making money off of it! Mucho dinero.
But few people caught the irony of the world failing to self-destruct just three days short of legendary folk musician Bob Dylan's 70th birthday, I'd wager, too. Especially in this year of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, no less--now under attack by a noted scholar as being “forged” in many places, of all things--and, equally as noteworthy, the 500th anniversary of what is now an obviously collapsing Protestant Reformation. Stack all those things side by side and you begin the see the scope of what has swept over us in half a century. And we don't have reason to be a little shaky?
Dylan was raised Jewish. He converted to Christianity in the 70's; and then like the rest of us, probably has done some backsliding since. But his songs always had words from an old-fashioned, simple religion that was easy for young Americans to pick up on, in an increasingly complex world. He didn't exactly start a “questioning” movement, but he did become an early accelerant to it.
Vietnam, for instance, somehow in what started out as a distant civil war, became dovetailed between what quickly became a blend of patriotic, middle-age and older citizens, on one hand (who not only could identify with the cruel vagaries of two past world wars but knew the importance, too, of stopping evil dead in its tracks when it first raises its head); and a younger generation, on the other hand, who'd come up thru bloody civil rights battles of their own at home.
These latter people were the vanguard of a wave of citizens who;d somehow sense their separateness early; that they were in line to be outsourced by a swelling, raw, corporate, political power machine—an emerging American plutocracy—and in expressing their objections to it they learned vicariously that to question political processes morally was the answer, all in itself, in their search for peace in a narcissistic world seemingly gone awry from basic human values of goodness.
Dylan, regardless of what intellectual reasons you'll find in researching this topic, more so than any other person, I believe, was simply in the right place at the right time; and caught the vibes of this younger, off-beat generation like a drum major stepping in, coalescing and giving direction to an energized but straggling marching band. His lyrics (many based on old-time religious hymns) kick-started them to new protest heights.
And that cynical strain—for which his early songs delineated such a demarcation line in our history—has hung there always since, sometimes like a haunting, ghostly shroud just below the level of our collective consciousness—teasing us always of the soon-to-be total passing of an old, worn-out era of thought. And encouraging even more bold challenges to the stressed foundation our society rests upon. And giving anybody and everybody a free swing at the bag in attacking it. Civil liberties need restraint.
President Obama's legacy won't be he mounted a horse named Change as it was leaving the chute, but that he dared to mount it in midfield in the first place. After it'd circled the arena several times; and after it'd already gone thru several other presidents who were unsuccessful at taming the damn beast.
Never mind using boot spurs hoping to direct such an animal toward some significant public goal. Just pray you can just hang on 'til the beast begins to wear himself out, and you can begin to rein him in. That's today's new cold reality.
The panoply of changes facing us, in the way shifting “cultural norms” are tossing and tugging us about, looms that large. Change, we could use a little less of.
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