When Bob Dylan sang The Times are a Changing in the 1960s, I don’t think he meant they would change quite the way they did.
Our generation has done some great things, but we’re really leaving a mess for our children to clean up.
On the positive side, we can congratulate ourselves on having made immense progress in so many areas, such as civil rights, which was perhaps what Dylan was mainly thinking about when he was a young singer in Greenwich Village.
It’s scarcely believable how black people were treated in America, or the way Catholics were treated in Northern Ireland before the civil rights movements began. There’s still a long way to go in many cases, but the situation is way better now than it was then.
And of course, we’ve also made great progress in all sorts of other ways, scientifically, medically, economically…and in many other fields and we can be rightly proud about that.
And yet.
And yet there’s still a feeling of unease among many of my generation. While trying to right all the wrongs we inherited did we fail to notice the heap of trouble that was coming up to face our children and grandchildren?
I think maybe we have to accept that we did.
And that it was this song is all about. I’m not laying blame, I’m as much to blame as anyone, but maybe a little bit of an acknowledgement might help our young people look more kindly on us as they face the problems that we played such a part in creating, even though we none of it was what we intended.
The melody is based, very loosely, on an old Irish song called the The Little Red Lark.