We the People: We’ve Met the Enemy

We’ve entered a new age. There are cynics who might shrug and say they’ve been there done that, explaining they’ve seen new ages come and go. Still, they might remember that once upon a time they might’ve been harbingers of a new age. But that was ages ago and memories fail. Now they mindlessly meander toward their demise, blissfully oblivious to the harm being done to our country and to the planet.

That’s the thing with new ages. They age out and with that, what was once new becomes old, stale, stuck in its ways. When that happens, some olds can get hardened, resistant to making space for the latest new age.

One of our biggest challenges is the olds who cling to power, as if they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if they relinquished it. Which, to be fair, they wouldn’t since it’s power that’s given meaning and purpose to their life.

In biblical times, the prophets didn’t just predict, they spoke truth to power, and they didn’t mince words. Also, they didn’t call down solely those who actually held the reins of power. They delivered their barbs to the people at large, letting them know in no uncertain terms they had lost their way and bad things would befall them if they didn’t change their behavior.  

The prophets’ media weren’t well-reasoned, intellectual op-eds in a Jerusalem Times. Nor did they research and confirm their sources. They just took a good look around and said, “This isn’t good.”

Their source was divine inspiration, or so they believed. Perhaps, but I like to think of their writings as being soulful tracts, arising from the font of their inner Muse, just like how artists, writers, and other creatives produce today. Regardless, the source of their message wasn’t the brain, but from a much deeper well.

We have had prophets like that throughout American history. A few produced prosaic tracts like the inspirational pamphlets Thomas Paine wrote during the American Revolution that castigated “sunshine patriots” and “summer soldiers.” But mostly, our prophecies have emanated from the pens of novelists, playwrights, and poets along with musicians and song writers.

Bob Dylan was one. His music and lyrics stirred a generation with songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” One in particular, though, captured the zeitgeist of the age: “The Times They Are A-Changin.”

Dylan comes right at us in the opening stanza by telling us to stop denying the waters we’re swimming—living—in are troubled. The truth is they’re rising and growing warmer, symbolically and literally. (Think melting ice shelfs, rising ocean temperatures, and hurricane intensity.)

In subsequent stanzas, he addresses writers and critics who pontificate and predict—prophesize—in their commentary, senators and congressmen who block progress, and mothers and fathers who don’t get it.

It’s there that Dylan tells parents, which can be interpreted as the larger adult population, not to criticize what they don’t understand because their children—our young adult generation—are beyond their/our command and their/our old way of doing things is fading. And if they/we can’t get onboard, at least get the heck out of the way.

Shades of Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophet, for whom the eponym “jeremiad” gets its name.

Jeremiah was a prophet in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE who spared no words when it came to lambasting not only the people for their depravity, social injustice, and idol worship but also the king for being self-centered, greedy, and materialistic. Sound familiar?

In a way, “The Times They Are A-Changin” is a jeremiad. Dylan forecasts upheaval when he sings about how the battle will shake windows and rattle halls.

And it did. We Boomers changed America in ways still not completely understood. But change it we did.

How quickly, though, many of us of an age forget. More than a half-century later and over the span of three successive generations, we, the ones who castigated the system and took on the establishment and staid culture, have become the establishment. As my friend Mark, a fellow Boomer, put it quoting Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly created that line for the 1970 Earth Day. I believe one of Kelly’s points was that since we created the goop we’re swimming in, it’s our responsibility to clean it up.

Supersizing. Excessive materialism. Clinging to power. Turning a blind eye. Darker parts of an age that’s grown old.