The Times They Are A Changin

The lines from the title of this post, gentle reader, obviously come from the Bob Dylan song.

I can remember hearing it for the first time just before I turned 17, when I had saved up money earned from picking tobacco at Beerwah, and had bought a record player. That was 1964.

The song was on Dylan's album of the same name which had just been released in the US.. I was into Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary at the time, but Dylan's anthem was the one that really grabbed my attention.

Peter, Paul and Mary were a bit vanilla.

The civil rights movement was in full swing in the US, and I remember being outraged at the TV images of protesters being cudgelled in Alabama after they reacted violently to bombings of the homes of civil rights leaders by members of the Alabama police force..

I remember the song coming over the car radio on a trip from Landsborough to Caloundra (where we had a seaside home at the time) and that my parents weren't too keen on the line "Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command".

I was the eldest of five back then, and was probably giving bad example.




Something like the same sense of outrage is developing now, although it has a very different face. In the US it is led now not by street protestors, but by elected representatives, most of them young and female, and many from minority groups.

To a lesser extent, the same phenomenon is marching through our parliament, as demonstrated by the increasing number of women sitting as independents in the H of R after resigning from the Coalition, or being elected on the senate cross benches.

The videos embedded above (courtesy of C-SPAN) feature Ilhan Omar (a newly-elected Democrat congresswoman) and Elliott Abrams (Trump's special envoy to Venezuela) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

They're riveting viewing, and encapsulates the force of this new movement, which reminds me so strongly of the youth movement of the sixties. Back then, before the internet, what was happening in the US happened here after a small lag of time. These days, the web has removed that time lag.

I doubt very much that anything will be the same again.

Bring it on.....