The Tooners' lead singer Greg Piper sent out a Tweet that quoted Graham Nash from Crosby, Stills & Nash as saying, "We thought we'd change the world..." It got re-Tweeted by someone called Graceslick77, who I imagine is a big Jefferson Airplane fan.
"We thought we'd change the world..." sounds as if old Graham is lamenting NOT having changed the world and that seems to be the prevailing attitude among old hippies. But stop for just a moment and try to imagine what would have happened and how the world would be different today if the folks of the Sixties had in fact NOT changed the world.
The Viet Nam War would have dragged on and on with the "full support" of the American public causing the needless deaths of many more thousands of American sons, the Civil Rights Movement and the Gay Liberation Movement and the Women's Movement would have progressed even slower than they did and without the support of the youth may even have died out for yet another generation.
The music of the last twenty years, thought to generally be awful by those of us old enough to remember the Sixties, would have nothing better by which to judge it but music itself may not have been so big a cultural phenomena and just another distraction and minor form of entertainment. In fact pre-Sixties music was pretty much considered background sound to other more important forms of entertainment such as dining out at a restaurant, shopping at a department or grocery store or as soundtrack to a movie or TV show.
If the use of music in the Sixties as a form of communication and education didn't happen then the political landscape of today might be much more like that of the Fifties; white, conservative and intolerant (kind of like the Bush years now that I think about it). Maybe Graham's quote was from 2000 to 2008 in which that case I can understand how he may have felt all that happened in the Sixties was for naught but things go in cycles and if you look around right NOW at the first African America President of the United States, the push for nonpolluting energy systems, the growing ecology movement and even the booming of Quantum Physics you see how they DID change the world.
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