The Times They Are A-Changin’ – but there can be no place in 2024 for apathy

Sixty years ago, on February 10th 1964, Bob Dylan released The Times They Are A-Changin’, his third album. Time hasn’t dimmed its urgency or power.

Declamatory and prophetic, it speaks as eloquently to today’s fractured, violent times as it did to the 1960s.

There are shoegazer songs like ‘Boots Of Spanish Leather’, still a busker favourite, and ‘One Too Many Mornings’, but the thrust of the album is deeply political.

‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ and ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’ address class and racial violence and assassination in the US, issues that are, hard to credit as it might seem, even more toxic than ever today.

‘The Ballad Of Hollis Brown’ is a Gothic blues about poverty, despair and a mass killing in Dakota.

‘North Country Blues’ is a mother’s lament at a mining company’s decision to outsource its operations to countries where labour costs are lower than in the U.S.A.

Almost everything has changed since the album was made – but if Dylan played these songs tomorrow they would sound freshly minted.

Despite his telling “mothers and fathers throughout the land” that their sons and daughters were beyond their command, the title song wasn’t a clarion call to inter-generational conflict. Rather, it was a call to action as the old order crumbled in the face of myriad challenges.

The first verse could be a climate change rallying call:

“Come gather ‘round, people, wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone…”

Sixty years later we, the most technologically developed humans ever, are confronted yet again by torrents of change at all levels. Different, and yet very like.

The mind-set and arrangements taken for granted since the end of World War II are faltering in the face of a once-more belligerent Russian empire, utter intransigence in the Middle East, ever-greater signs of climate breakdown and a migrant crisis that shows no sign of abating.

We face new forms of war, the dawn of AI, clear and present threats of disease and famine – and we’re snowed under by illegal and semi-legal recreational drugs.

And rampant misogyny, racial prejudice, intimidation, exploitation and a global rage that never sleeps are here, thanks to the digital technology and platforms insinuated into every conceivable nook and cranny of communication, commerce and research.

SHADES OF OPINION

The platforms were supposed to usher in a bright, hopeful new world of light and hope filled with happy and informed consumers.

But in world politics they’ve worked in favour of darkness and division, domination and doom.

This is a year of elections around the world. By the end of the year half of the world’s voting age population will have been called to the polls.

Some, of course, are pre-determined elections. They are the known knowns. They are no worry to anyone, especially ruling elites.

Our fears are for the rest. And there are reasons to be fearful, Part 103.

The gloom at the picture that’s emerging is pervasive, amid a general sense that forces of darkness are ascending.

But even at this juncture we can say that it’s rather more complex than that.

Elections in Poland and Spain late last year and in India, Hungary and Ireland this year, to name but a few, have bucked the threatened right-ward trend. And the UK has elected a Labour Government, with one of the biggest majorities in history.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his wife Victoria arrive at No 10 Downing Street. Credit: Kirsty O'Connor/ No 10 Downing Street

Yes but, you might justifiably ask, what about France, and Argentina and, scariest of all, what is on the cards in the USA?

Good questions all. But still, it’s too simplistic to shoehorn global complexities into a simple contest between right and left or, in the Anglosphere, progressive/liberal versus conservative/authoritarian.

It also ignores the many, and often irreconcilable, shades of opinion on either side, as well as the frequent situations where the apparently diametrically opposed co-operate to fight a common battle.

The Anglophone world tends towards the blunt, the definite, the binary choice and debate: Democrats and Republicans, Tories and Labour, and so on.

But many European countries have either a form of proportional representation or a second chance face-off, as in France.

In all – or certainly most – cases the process favours the centre and, despite the shift towards less tolerant candidates.

This happened in the European Parliament elections and our local elections – but won’t in those countries where it’s basically a choice between two opposite camps and the first past the post is the winner, sometimes with less than 20% of the votes cast.

This polarises debate. It also means that a very large proportion feel excluded. Which they are.

MORE GOOD THAN HARM

Up here on Hog Hill we have little time for Nigel Farage or his Reform UK party. But while they got more votes than the Tories in many constituencies they’ve only achieved a handful of seats. It’ll be interpreted as a stinging rebuff from the voters, which it isn’t.

They should be in the UK parliament. It’s not because they are right or worthy. They aren’t. It’s because they represent a significant slice of the UK population whose views – crass and obnoxious as they might be – should be reflected. If excluded, they have a grievance to fuel their fire.

Proportional representation isn’t perfect, but it more accurately reflects the messiness of people’s attitudes, political persuasions and priorities.

Some voters are conservative on religious grounds, but radical on social justice. Others are radical on personal sexual choices, but conservative on social and economic grounds.

Nativist libertarians in the US have supported opponents of oil and gas pipelines. But it’s not because they have a green agenda. It’s because the pipelines “violate” landowners’ rights.

Meanwhile, even though the Anglophone commentariat places the Greens firmly on the left, many Greens are centrists, conservatives or contrarians.

And that’s okay.

At the end of the day, we can be led by our differences or by what we share. We can be defined by who and what we hate rather than who and what we love.

These are choices. There’s nothing inevitable about how we act.

But there can be no place in 2024 for apathy.

In the third verse of ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ Dylan tells senators and congressmen that “He that gets hurt will be he who has stalled“ and exhorts them to action: “The battle outside ragin’/ Will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls”…

Well, our windows and walls are rattling now. The question is what do we do? And how?

Dylan’s abiding message from sixty years ago is that it’s important to take a stand, to try to make this world a better place rather than worse – to be, in the end, a person who does more good than harm.

Let us not die wondering.