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“There’s something happening here / But what it is ain’t exactly clear...”
“I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound? / Everybody look what’s going down”
These are the lyrics to this 1966 protest song by Buffalo Springfield, written by Stephen Stills. It describes the tension and paranoia of the Sunset Strip riots. It is titled For What’s It’s Worth, but identified as ‘There’s something happening here.”
“There’s battle lines being drawn / Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong...”
“We better stop, hey, what’s that sound? / Everybody look what’s going down.”
*I give praise to Leigh Horne’s brilliance as a writer on Substack. She posted the lyrics to that song. Thanks, Horne, you gave me hope that things are a changing.
Yesterday I started to write this blog—I was griping about apps. Apps here, apps there, everywhere an app app. Even coffee kiosks want you to order using an app. I was complaining because I called a company by phone—hey, the number was listed on their ad, but they asked me if I had an app. I think I did because I use their phone service, but I had never used it and didn’t know my 15-word code. They offered to guide me through it. Sometimes we want guidance. I just wanted to ask a question.
I graciously excused myself, but didn’t feel gracious.
I think I’m becoming a Curmudgeon. I’m fried like half the country.
You know how events, like technology, come along and we are so excited with them, take cell phones. What a wonderful invention. And then we have to limit their use because young people become so addicted it takes over their life.
Once, when I was a teenager, my boyfriend and I took a drive into a forest in Oregon. We had taken a logging load. I had used my folks’ car, and I got it stuck. Try as we might, we couldn’t dislodge that vehicle. So, we walked home—half the night, all the while thinking that any strange sound, a snap or a crunch, was a cougar stalking us.
We made it to a pay phone and called my folks, who still had a phone attached to the wall by a cord. (Everybody did.) My dad drove out with us the following day and got the car out easily. It’s a good thing we remembered where we had left it.
My point?
Sometimes technology is really handy. Except we are left wondering if it will save us or swallow us.
One of my favorite quotes is by the poet William Cowper. “To find the medium takes some share of wit, so tis a mark fools seldom hit.”
We’re impatient, fed up, irritated, and probably intentionally driven crazy. Of course, I am speaking for myself, but it feels right for about half the country. And I see how some people hold so tenaciously to their beliefs that wild horses couldn’t drag it out of them. But then why would wild horses want to drag anything? They want to be free. Human or critter, no one wants to be a slave.
Another take from Horne is her comment on Angie Nixon, whom she didn’t know about, nor did I, until she won the Democratic Primary for the US Senate in Florida.
“Just wow,” said Horne after she listened to Nixon being interviewed. “This young working mother and public-spirited volunteer for social justice just blew me away.”
“Nixon is a single working mother and is now a stepmother. She is down to earth, smart, informed, and above all unafraid to listen to and otherwise engage with the people she wants to represent in Congress. The fact that she’s black is another plus.” Horne, a certifiably white person, says, "Black people, of necessity and through no choice of their own, have always understood the nature of oppression and their oppressors. And it’s about time we fully recognized that they have a whole lot to teach us about not only how to resist them, but how to take care of themselves and each other on the long, long road to freedom and dignity.”
P.S. William Cowper wrote, among many other poems and songs, “Amazing Grace,” and “The Negro’s Complaint,” 1788.
