NOTHING HAS CHANGED

I have always been a Bob Dylan fan, much to the chagrin of my wife.   During the mid 1960 I was in the military in a Navy special unit.    The Vietnam war was in it's beginnings and the counterculture seemed alien to me - out of step with my military commitment and programming.   But, the music haunted me.   As I got older and the concept of war soured, the protest songs of that era spoke to me in a deep resonance.  

We have a new car and it allows me to connect my small Sonsa music recorder to the car stereo    

Running numerous errands this morning (the wife at home) I  selected a Dylan album.  Dylan's gravel voice boomed through the six speakers with 'The Times They Are A Changing."   I played it again, and then again.   The power of Dylan is not in the music but in the words; and I couldn't help but reflect back some forty years to the hope for the future that was the basis of the protest generation.  

And I realized that nothing has changed.

 Come gather ’round people

Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth saving’
Then you better start swimming’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changing’

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no telling’ who that it’s naming’
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times they are a-changing’

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
There’s a battle outside and it is raging’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changing’

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 aging’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changing’

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fading’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changing’

Copyright © 1963, 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1992 by Special Rider Music

We are still at war
The poor are still down trodden 
The government is dysfunctional
There is defacto-racism
And a drive to disenfranchise women and minorities.


The times did not change.

the Ol'Buzzard

DAJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN

A RAMBLING FROM NERD LAND. 

Over my seventy-plus years I have, rarely, but occasionally been in a situation where I had a flash insight that I had experienced a particular place, situation or group of people before – though I never had.    This feeling usually came out of the blue, lasted for a second and passed; and later was hard to remember or totally forgotten.  

If it were just me I would write it off as some synapse in my brain misfiring and giving me a visual presentation of a memory download.   But, my wife has experienced it - and almost everyone I know says they have had similar experiences.  

The most comfortable solution would be a brain fart; but, stick with me on this: when it comes to understanding reality, experience can be deceptive. 

Over the last three hundred years, despite continuous religious opposition, Science, and especially Physics, has demystified most of the natural occurrences of our earth and  our solar system.  Science has now moved to the realm of explaining the universe and the cosmos, relying heavily on Einstein’s theories of relativity and quantum mechanics.   Many of these theories require you to leave your comfort zone and accept strange concepts of reality. 

Physicists come from a wide discipline of studies: theoretical physics, relativistic physics, quantum physics, cosmological physics, computational physics and unified physics.    The hope is, at some time in the future, a unification of all these different disciplines will result in one overall grand theory that will explain all phenomena.

The one thing that is curious about all the physics disciplines is that at some point they all converge to a theme of parallel-universes.   Theoretical Physics proposes the possible of parallel – mirror universes that are just beyond our reality: universes where we exist in a complimentary energy realm.  This would pose the question of which realm was the bona fied and which was the mirror image. 

Einstein’s Special Relativity depends on the assumption that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light: among other things, this theory continues on to say that as you approach the speed of light, time in your frame of existence slows down.   The thought is that if you could exceed the speed of light time travel into the past would be theoretically possible.

 Recently, in the super Hadron Collider in Cern, Switzerland a particle traveling faster than the speed of light was discovered: it popped into existence for a small fraction of a second and then vanished.   

Rather than traveling through time I might pose that this particle was transiting across parallel universes.

Making a big circle: could our experience of  Daja vu be an electronic flash from a parallel-mirror universe?     

I’m just asking. 

Maybe that's where all those extra socks come from in the drier.  

the Ol’Buzzard

Kinda makes the Republican convention seem more ridiculous doesn’t it.