'the times they are a changin'
Written 56 years ago and still relevant, “Come gather 'round people wherever you roam and admit that the waters around you have grown”. Bob Dylan’s classic ode to the times.
It shouldn’t be a surprise. Everything changes. Our planet is changing, our bodies are changing, stars are being born and stars are dying.
Change is the hallmark of our time. AI and robots and space travel and transgender people and ecological collapse and economic disasters. Changes are happening faster than they ever have. Empires only last a couple of hundred years - witness the USA.
As humans, we tend to shield ourselves from change, especially if it confronts our core values. We want things to be normal, comfortable and convenient. We have insurance companies and government institutions and armies and Monday to Friday work weeks to maintain the status quo. Change causes anxiety.
Anxiety causes all kinds of aberrant behaviour. I’m looking at you, America. It’s never been weirder, for me atleast, living in this country. I barely recognize the place. Lies are truth, I mean obvious lies are truth, and if you support the lies you are rewarded. It bodes ill to sacrifice truth on the altar of expediency, but the times they are changin.
Are we ready for it? No, probably not. It’ll come as a big shock. Like death. Who is ever ready for that? And that’s why there’s so much anxiety. I don’t think I’m calling this wrong. We have groups that are staunchly white racist supremacists and they’re normal. We have groups that promote weird, really, really weird, screwed up conspiracy theories. Where did they come up with that? Hillary Clinton has a child sex ring in a pizzeria? Why a pizzeria? Couldn’t she find a more elegant place to boink young boys?
A deep malaise has settled on our country. Maybe the whole world. I think I’ve got this right. We’ve lost touch with our own sense of discrimination. We can tell the truth from lies, but we have turned off the feature.
We’ve lost touch with a lot more than that - it seems to me we’ve lost touch with ourselves, our own humanity. We seem to be confused about who we are. Are we the good guys who rescue the baby, or are we the bad guys who threw it in the river? Bad analogy I know, it’s the best one I could think of. Are we the ones to save the world or the ones to destroy it? It seems to be an open question.
Self-knowledge, like Socrates ‘Know yourself.’ would be helpful. Dialogue with your fellow humans would be helpful. Introspection, self-reflection would be good. Isn’t that what the time out was all about?
“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”