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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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You say you want a revolution—well, you know, we all want to change the world . . . So sang a change-weary John Lennon in 1968. As the leader of the Beatles, the world’s biggest pop group of the 1960s, he knew a bit about revolutionary change. Just five years earlier, he and Paul McCartney announced a sound, an image and an outlook that ushered in a golden era for British pop. The sound was “Mersey”; their outlook was all fun and wit.
As much as their music, it was the Beatles’ Goons-ish humour that won fans. They had a playfulness, an irony and satire that made pop groups before them (and many after) look and sound dull. The Beatles became the underlying rhythm of social changes that defined a generation.
But when you talk about destruction—don’t you know that you can count me out . . .
By 1968, the United States had put nearly half a million troops into saving South Vietnam from communism. Australia made good Harold Holt’s promise of “All the way with LBJ” by sending its first official troops. Youth morale and societal consensus correspondingly nosedived, especially in the US. Books on how to beat the draft circulated on uni campuses and news of an American-led massacre at My Lai confirmed everything held to be bad about the war, unifying opposition to the conflict and exposing the hypocrisy of war.
You say you got a real solution—well, you know, we’d all love to see the plan . . .
Finding a way through the revolutionary morass of the 1963-68 period wasn’t easy. We were told to “drop out, turn on, tune in” and to “do your own thing,” to “don’t think twice (it’s alright)” and to “make love not war.”
Others thought that rather than this “summer-of-love” ethos, assassinations were the way to go—Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy paid the price. Ghetto riots, civil rights marches and student protests were other methods, but they were met with tear gas and fixed bayonets. Black Power sought to solve Afro-American problems by raising its clenched fist and declaring itself to be anti-war, anti-white and anti-Christian.
Elsewhere, the Soviet Union crushed the Czechoslovakian democracy movement while the Israelis thrashed its neighbours in the Six-day War. Little wonder the most popular songs reflected my generation’s disenchantment with political solutions: “Help!” “The Sounds of Silence” and “Eve of Destruction” et al.
You tell me it’s the institution—well, you know, you better free your mind instead . . .
A one-hit wonder of the 1960s was Napoleon XIV’s over-the-top “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha Ha!” The world did seem to be going mad and the lack of answers was driving us mad. The desire to change the world, and the realisation of an inability to do so on our own, has driven many an idealist crazy. But madness isn’t an appropriate way for anyone to end, let alone a world that was created in goodness. The argument was between structuralists (change the system) and idealists (change the person).
Are the failings of humans due primarily to our material or our spiritual condition? The philosophical choice in 1968 was between Lenin (V I Ulianov) and Lennon (John Winston). Between Lenin’s program to abolish the capitalist state and its institutions, and Lennon’s advice that the priority is to “free your mind instead.”
Lennon, like the 19th century Nietzsche, yearned for a world beyond religion and politics. That was the revolution he sought and which he was to later “imagine.” I couldn’t help but find a similar yearning in myself during the 1960s, but my answer was a more familiar one: Jesus Christ.
Indeed, it still is. The world can be changed without Him (as it has), but our minds can only be changed most deeply by Him. He is “the revolution” and the thing is not to transcend Him but to find world peace and personal freedom in Him.
Song words quoted are from the Beatles, “Revolution” (Lennon-McCartney, 1968), The Beatles Lyrics, Futura Publications, London, 1975, page 152.
Extract from Signs of the Times, Janurary / February 2003.
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