Thursday, February 11, 2016

A Serious Peace Piece

​​I read a Rolling Stone article about the late Glenn Frey yesterday, and it mentioned that his hit songs featured "melodies that were perfect for the easygoing mood of the Seventies." I don't mean to dwell on the past, and I am thankful for life's many experiences in the intervening years, but reading that made me so grateful for having spent my late teens and early twenties in that unique decade.

What was it that made the Seventies "easygoing?" Certainly, they weren't that way at every point in time between Eric Clapton and Talking Heads, but overall, I believe what made the decade special was a combination of the overall decompression following the Vietnam war combined with an open-mindedness and sensitivity to others that has yet to be replicated. We seem to have become a more callous society. Many of the challenges that we face today are those that have been created from within: detachment, pessimism and isolationism are prime examples. We live on the very same planet that we inhabited in 1974, yet in many ways, it feels like a different world. The thing is, it doesn't have to be this way.

I don't preach about many things, and I'm not a hippie awaiting the return of psychedelia, but I think it would serve us well as a society to try to bring back some of the sentiment of the Seventies, to celebrate with those we love and at the same time, to be aware of challenges that others we know may be facing. Given our current modern methods of communication and the ever-expanding world of social media, it seems like we might be able to give ourselves a head start. We're all in this together, and maybe if we try, we can once again achieve at least a degree of that "peaceful, easy feeling" that Glenn Frey sang about all those years ago.