Quote:
<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally spoken by Utah Phillips:
[What I do] has been criticized as.. "Oh that's that 60s stuff. Or if I'm doing old rock and roll, that 50s stuff. This is the 90s, you know!"
I have a good friend in the East: a good folk singer and a good song collector, who comes and listens to my shows and says, "You sing a lot about the past. You can't live in the past, you know?" And I say to him, "I can go outside and pick up a rock that's older than the oldest song you know and bring it back in here and drop it on your foot.
"The past didn't go anywhere. Did it? It's right here, it's right now."
I always thought that anyone who told me I couldn't live in the past was trying to get me to forget something that, if I remembered, would get them in serious trouble. No, it's not that 50s, 60s, 70s, 90s... that whole idea of decade packaging, things just don't happen that way. The Viet Nam War heated up in 1967 and ended in 1975. What's that got to do with decades?
No, that packaging of time is a journalistic convenience that they use to trivialize and to dismiss important events and important ideas.
Time is an enormous long river. And I am standing in it, just as you are standing in it. My elders were the tributaries and everything they thought and every struggle they went through and everything they gave their lives to and every song they created and every poem they put down flows to me. And if I take the time to act, to see, if I take the time to reach out.. I can build a bridge between my world and theirs and take out what I need to get through this world.
Bridges. Bridges from my time to your time, as my elders from their time to my time. And we all put into the river and we let it go, it flows away from us and away from us until it no longer has our name, our identity. It has its own utility, its own use and people will take what they need and make it part of their lives.
The past didn't go anywhere. Did it?</font>
[What I do] has been criticized as.. "Oh that's that 60s stuff. Or if I'm doing old rock and roll, that 50s stuff. This is the 90s, you know!"
I have a good friend in the East: a good folk singer and a good song collector, who comes and listens to my shows and says, "You sing a lot about the past. You can't live in the past, you know?" And I say to him, "I can go outside and pick up a rock that's older than the oldest song you know and bring it back in here and drop it on your foot.
"The past didn't go anywhere. Did it? It's right here, it's right now."
I always thought that anyone who told me I couldn't live in the past was trying to get me to forget something that, if I remembered, would get them in serious trouble. No, it's not that 50s, 60s, 70s, 90s... that whole idea of decade packaging, things just don't happen that way. The Viet Nam War heated up in 1967 and ended in 1975. What's that got to do with decades?
No, that packaging of time is a journalistic convenience that they use to trivialize and to dismiss important events and important ideas.
Time is an enormous long river. And I am standing in it, just as you are standing in it. My elders were the tributaries and everything they thought and every struggle they went through and everything they gave their lives to and every song they created and every poem they put down flows to me. And if I take the time to act, to see, if I take the time to reach out.. I can build a bridge between my world and theirs and take out what I need to get through this world.
Bridges. Bridges from my time to your time, as my elders from their time to my time. And we all put into the river and we let it go, it flows away from us and away from us until it no longer has our name, our identity. It has its own utility, its own use and people will take what they need and make it part of their lives.
The past didn't go anywhere. Did it?</font>
Sorry it was so long. It's just every time I see someone post that they'd seen the headline, or the link was posted or that the thread contains nothing but old news this comes back to me. Something to think about, especially with the way the media tends to rapidly cycle through tragedies these days and the cause of tomorrow's horrors might be preventable if we actually think about and remember today's. I know there's a difference between seeing a dancing badger multiple times and remembering major wars but the habit is a dangerous one to get into. Anyway, maybe some food for thought.
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