There are changes swirling in the widening gyre

“Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call / Don’t stand in the doorway don’t block up the hall / For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled / There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’ / It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls / For the times they are a-changin’” – Bob Dylan

I remember the first time I heard that song, way back in ’64. I was just a kid at the time; girls, shaving and puberty were still years distant. I had heard the word “politics,” but had no idea what it meant. Even so, that song spoke to me on a level I couldn’t begin to understand.

The years sped by beneath the nightly televised specter of Vietnam as I edged ever closer to the age when I, too, would be required to register for the draft.

Was I scared? Hell, yes, I was scared. I did not want to return home in one of those flag-draped caskets I saw on TV every night. I did not want to die for a cause that made no sense to me.

Neither did a lot of young men; some died anyway, including some I called friends. Others protested, raising their voices against a war they saw as senseless. Because of their voices – in part, at least – the war in Vietnam wound down just as I was reaching draft age. I registered but was never inducted.

I later joined up on my own. I liked the military but was never particularly good at being a soldier. I just wanted to serve my country, like my old man, my Uncle Ray, my grandfather, my great-grandfather; all served at one time or another.

But even during my time in uniform I remained thankful to those protestors. The kids gunned down at Kent State, the 100,000 who filled the streets of Washington, D.C. in ’67, the millions more who gathered across the nation … it’s possible I – and a lot of other guys my age – are alive today because those protestors made their voices heard in a way that would not be silenced.

Don’t get me wrong, I never sided with the idiots who spit on our returning troops or screamed “baby killer” from the cozy safety of the sidelines. Too many of my friends and relatives were among those in uniform and I knew them to be good people.

To this day, our Vietnam vets don’t get the respect they earned and deserve, though things are improving. Still, too little, too late, in my opinion.

And now this country is swept up in another polarizing storm. This time the war’s in our own backyard, in our schoolyards, classrooms, hallways. Though the venue has changed, the body bags remain the same. The tears, the televised sobs of parents who will never again see a son, a daughter; the ineffectual, corrupt politicians who extend hopes and prayers rather than meaningful legislation.

For those of us who lived through the Vietnam era, it’s all eerily familiar.

The kind of folks who mistake Facebook memes for wisdom claim that out of every bad thing a good thing comes. I’m not sure that’s true. All the protests over Vietnam, the war itself, the civil rights movement that was happening at the same time; it could be argued they helped birth a better nation than the one we had before; more tolerant, enlightened, equal.

But it was a painful, bloody birth. Was it all worth it? Historians may know; I do not.

I just know it did my heart good to see the recent news photos of those young protestors in Washington and around the country. They’re mad as hell and they should be. To borrow from Yeats, there’s a rough beast running loose in this country and for too long nobody’s done a thing to stop it. Maybe this is the start. Maybe this is the loosened pebble that will grow into an avalanche.

Again, I don’t know. You could fit all the wisdom I possess into a thimble and still have room for your thumb. I don’t know any more about politics now than I did back when Dylan wrote that song.

I own guns myself and not the sort one uses for hunting. But just like in the sixties, I’m sick of seeing body bags. Something’s got to change.

If our leaders lack the courage to make a stand, maybe it’s time history repeats itself. For the first time in a long time I think I feel the ground beginning to swell beneath me.

A change is coming.

MTaylor325@gmail.com

(616) 745-9530

How I found Jesus while feeding chickens

It was the summer of 1973; what most folks really mean when they say “the ‘60s.” 

Inflation was rampant, the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade, Nixon told the world — with a straight face — that he was “not a crook.” I wasn’t paying attention to any of it.

I was just a kid, 17, and world events played little part in my daily life. My girlfriend, Dianne, had dumped me a couple months earlier (yes, it was happening even then!) and I was waiting for my broken heart to mend. I had too much time on my hands and too little to do.

Which is why sunrise on the Fourth of July found me sitting on my guitar case by the Leonard Street on-ramp. Two dollars and 39 cents nestled lonely in my pocket, my battered backpack — containing only a box of Rye Crisp crackers and three pieces of beef jerky — leaned against the guard rail. I raised my thumb in the direction I wanted to go: south and west.

The second car to roll past, a Country Squire station wagon just like the one my parents owned and driven by a little old lady, picked me up. She took me most of the way through Indiana.

She was a sweet old gal who said I reminded her of her son, who had died a few years earlier in Vietnam. She slipped twenty bucks in my backpack when she finally dropped me off just outside Terre Haute.

From there, a series of cars and trucks — driven by hippies, gay guys, old couples, cute girls — moved me along as far as Hodgeman County, Kansas. An inebriated guy in a pickup let me out just outside a mid-sized city with the improbable name of Jetmore.

It was there I sat for 18 hours straight without getting a lift. Back then, it seemed everyone was willing to pick up a hitch-hiker, even one as scruffy and (probably) smelly as I was after a week on the road. But not in Jetmore. Eighteen hours, man; that’s a long time to sit by a freeway on-ramp.

When the rain started, I was not surprised.

Eventually, a rusted out Chevy van eased to the shoulder and honked. A girl about my age hopped out the passenger door, lifted the back hatch and loaded in my guitar case while I grabbed my pack.

The first question was always the same: “Where you headed?” 

“Phoenix,” I said.

“Oh, we’re just going 20 miles down the road, but at least that’ll give you a chance to dry off.”

I thanked her and closed the hatch. Twenty miles was 20 miles. Not far, but better than nothing.

Instead of smelling like pot (a lot of Chevy vans did back then) getting into this one I was greeted with the good earth smell of potatoes, though none were in evidence.

“How ya doing, man?” said Jesus, the van’s driver. He wasn’t really Jesus, but he did look exactly like him, assuming the real Jesus looked exactly like the guy who played him in that “Superstar” movie.

“You look like Jesus,” I said.

He laughed. “Yeah, I get that a lot, man.”

The driver’s was Dave, not Jesus, but it turned out he and the girl — I forget her name — were Jesus freaks. That’s what people called them at the time; it wasn’t derogatory.

They were very nice, though they both did their best to redeem my misbegotten soul in the half-hour it took to get to the commune where they lived with a dozen other 20-something hippies.

The rain had not abated and when they asked me to stay the night, I gratefully accepted. The night turned into a week, the week into two weeks, two weeks into three.

My “job” was to feed the chickens, shovel out coops, and gather eggs. In exchange, I received a bed, organic (and lousy) food, and more prayer meetings than Mother Theresa would have been able to handle comfortably. It didn’t take me long to fall into the rhythm of the place.

I got to know Sandy, one of the girls who lived there. We shared a brief romance and when she announced she was moving back to her folk’s house in Los Angeles, I talked her into dropping me in Glendale, near Phoenix, even though it was a couple hours out her way.

I didn’t get back to Michigan until summer was well over and autumn begun. I learned a lot that summer, about chickens, Jesus, and guys who only look like Jesus.

I can’t honestly say I’d like to do it all again. But like almost everything I’ve done in this life, I’m glad I did it once.

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