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The eve
Last night “the boys” were in 1960s music nostalgia mode. While jamming, my brother (a much younger-than-us person) suggested they play “that battle-slash-anthem-song about the War in Vietnam. “I can’t remember the name or the artist” he said. “Eve of Destruction”, I shouted from the sofa. And so they did. They strummed so nice, they played it twice. Each time with all of the force and angst and passion of those times when flower-power, loveins and protests were as everyday as a cellphone on the dining table. In the sixties, LOML and I were long-haired hippy weirdos who sang, protested and shouted about the injustices of the time. We knew the songs of love/freedom/ protest, word-forward. My brother is much younger, but he knows the sentiment— because things haven’t really changed much since then. If you don’t know the song, Eve of Destruction, the lyrics allude to the social issues of the sixties. The song touched on the assassination of JFK, the Vietnam War and the American draft. It addressed the ongoing threat of nuclear war and bowed, deeply, to the Civil Rights movement. If I’m not mistaken, it also spoke to the unrest in the Middle East and, believe it or not, the then-growing American Space program.
The boys sang and strummed while yakking about how to transition more easily from one chord to the next. Each said how that particular piece of music spoke to them. As I listened to their banter and their music and the words of the song, I thought about how we were still dealing with the same issues. More than 50 years have passed and we hadn’t really made any progress. Eve of Destruction was supposed to be a wake-up anthem of the mid-sixties, an observation and a warning. It was an example of everything that was wrong with the world at that particular moment in time. So controversial was the sentiment of the song, several American, Canadian and UK radio stations banned the song from their playlists. I couldn’t shake the feeling that with very few changes, it could easily be the anthem of this decade. While the voting age for US citizens has dropped to eighteen from twenty-one years, if a draft is enacted citizens as young as seventeen could be called up. Too young to vote but not too young to tote a gun in an armed conflict. And, at this point in time, it seems entirely possible conscription could be enacted in the USA.
What’s wrong with us? Events of the past should have been lessons and examples to all of us. There were so many occasions to learn. We heard the words, saw the outcomes and then froze on an “open book” final. And for some reason, as Canadians, we believe we are better than our southern neighbours. We really aren’t. Huge numbers of us still form opinions of others based on the colour of their skin and decide if their religious and political affiliations aren’t the same as ours, they must be a problem. We giggle and say, “just kidding” and post pictures which “jokingly” ask why a refugee is given more social assistance dollars than a “real Canadian” veteran or senior citizen suffering financial hardships.
Well, to be fair, we do post thousands of helpful memes about how angry we are and how we’ve had enough of war and of inequality and of racism and of ecological annihilation. We most obviously know we are on the eve of destruction. We just don’t believe it.
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