We Still Dream of Peace

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I remember a time when we thought

we would change the world,

and we almost did:

the civil rights movement,

the women's movement,

Kent State,

Viet Nam:

"Hell no, we wont go",

flowers in gun barrels,

Make Love, Not War,

and

Give Peace a Chance.

Empowerment,

liberation,

joy

were in the air.

Hippies ambled, smiling,

up and down Fourth Avenue.

Haight-Ashbury was where it was at;

hair, beards, dresses all were long

and almost......almost

came the revolution.

Until they began

silencing the world-changers,

the visionaries, with bullets:

Gandhi,

Martin Luther King,

 young civil rights activists,

J.F.K.,

Bobby Kennedy,

John Lennon.

We gave up then,

retreating, shell-shocked,

into our solitary caves,

to mourn our young slain heroes.

The Establishment was

-and still is-

loathe to give up

its rapacious way of being.
The Military-Industrial Complex
won that round.

We Baby Boomers

felt our hope leap up again

when Barak Obama reminded us

what it is to dream,

just how badly

we all wanted change,

and, once again,

 what it is to have a leader

you can believe in.

One still has to hope

that if seven billion consciousnesses

could somehow unite

at the same moment in time,

that better world we long for

might yet arrive.

All these years and
so many heartbreaks later,
we still tear up
when we hear Imagine.
We still all dream
of peace.

I read a wonderful poem at ManicDDaily about the November 22 anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination, which I remember well. I remember sitting, a few days later, in my classroom, watching the funeral on television and how John-John broke all our hearts with his three-year-old salute to his father. I dug around in drafts and found this, written likely on the anniversary a couple of years back, and dusted it off.

I am happy to see, especially with Craig and Mark Kielburger's We Day and Free the Children movement, that there are many young people still dreaming of changing the world - and working hard towards that end.