THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’

Bob Dylan wrote one of the best songs ever written by the title above. The song is optimistic despite its criticism of the past. Can we say that we are equally optimistic regarding our common future?

Bob Dylan wrote one of the best protest songs ever written by the title of ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’. The song is full of optimism despite its criticism of what Dylan perceived of the past and is imbued with his hopes for a better future.

Can we say, the day after the brutal abduction of Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores from Venezuela, and all else occurring across the western world, that we can share any of the optimism regarding our own future that Dylan expressed so eloquently in 1964?

Trump, the wannbe U.S. dictator who considers himself above international laws and all decent conduct is a symptom of our times across the western world. Trump is clearly determined to use the remaining power of the USA to dominate and exploit any weaker nation he conceives of as a good target. Of course this spirit of conquest does not originate with Trump. Its origins are many. Though Trump’s true intent regarding Venezuela is to acquire its oil the genesis of the general U.S. crusader spirit regarding the ‘bad guys’ of this world lies, to some extent at least, in a general idealism still found in the West while permeated with a large portion of naivety.

If you are of a certain age you will remember better times. In the largely Christian cultures of both the USA and UK in earlier days there was generally a lesser amount of corruption and crime around (not that it was small, but less than now). Along with a growing affluence after WWII the Yanks and Brits thought they lived in rather special nations. In the USA there was a certain pioneer spirit, that of self-made men and women with spirit, energy and enterprise who took full advantage of the growing wealth in the late Forties and onward (particularly in the USA, a nation that not being riven internally by the forces of war was now in a position to resupply Europe as well as the rest of the world). Britain slowly dragged itself up from near penury and rationing to start supplying household goods to the masses. (Modest homes gradually began being improved through the purchase of affordable, mass produced goods. A washing machine, a vacuum cleaner, perhaps a refrigerator by the early Sixties then a TV and quite likely in the early Sixties also, a first car for the family. We had survived the war. Together our parents/grandparents had beaten the scourge of pure evil personified by Adolf Hitler. We were ready to rebuild our lives again. And crucially, to watch over the world to ensure no other evils could rise to threaten us ever again.

Many realities we had experienced, as well as many myths we had consciously or subconsciously accepted as underpinning our actions, focused our attention as survivors and crusaders for good. We had proven ourselves to be “the good guys” and we took on the duty of standing guard. Unfortunately, times and people change. While the initial impulse had integrity and goodness at its heart those who came after clearly also found good in these actions for themselves. Having influence over other nations, even power over them if truth be told, offered certain advantages and with those who had begun the idealistic charge fading from the picture a far less idealistic crew emerged. They simply incorporated messages that relied on the relatively unalloyed expression of goodness that had come before to engage in less savory intents to gain ever more power, influence and wealth.

We are now in a largely godless age where an anything goes, semi- or completely criminal attitude to influence, power and wealth accumulation is fast becoming the rule. Somehow or other the idea that we can cooperate and share in the creation of ever better times has become passé, even seen as completely misguided, that a tough-guy, uncompromising attitude to all competition must be assumed to the detriment of many. The elites who have grown so very rich since the time of Thatcher/Reagan appear still to have ravenous appetites for ever more. The degradation of supposed elite persons, such as Madoff and Epstein along with other so-called elite figures across many fields has sickened us. Just as the Roman Empire fell through similar levels of elite and social decadence I detect we, USA, UK and, less so, parts of Europe are taking this same path downward.

Trump is quite obviously a symptom of this decline. His appeal is largely through gut emotions, harshly framed prejudice, barefaced lies and dangerously simplistic arguments and “solutions”. People, less well educated than ever apparently, despite the encyclopedia at their fingertips of the internet, seemingly joyously imbibe the feelgood factor of thinking he’s speaking for them. But since Thatcher set up focus groups to see what people wanted to hear and then feed it back to them, this perceived honesty of speech of politicians is nothing of the kind.

There is now a sadness among many in the West. A deep and abiding sadness that we have arrived at such a time. Those who remember the Sixties will remember how we were all going to work to make the world a much better place. No more wars. Global cooperation. And such dreams as these. Those of us of a certain age carry a weary sadness of the situation we have now reached wherever we go, perhaps heartened by our travels outside the collective west to nations in Central Asia perhaps and beyond where life is lived very much as it ever was through traditional ways of thinking and living that are largely untouched by the worst of the modern western world. Those of us who live within that western world, stressed, depressed and with a sinking feeling that things are only going to get worse can only wonder how we arrived in this terrible place at this most awful of all times.

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