Old Made Young

What goes away comes back to stay. Ain’t it so more times than no? This thought came while marveling at an aging minstrel made young on a big screen, his boyish proxy singing a 60-year-old anthem of a bygone era that revisits us in this new year.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’

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
The battle outside ragin’
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’

Those lyrics ringing out from that tinny voice took me back, not to 1964 but a quarter century earlier when John Steinbeck wrote of surplus harvest “destroyed to keep up the price.” How “men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges” despite a “mi…