One experience common for Baby Boomers when we were kids is that we were subjected to air raid drills at school, where we were taught to dive under our desks and shield our heads — as if that would save us in a nuclear attack.
All serious looks at Bob Dylan’s writing, including Martin Scorsese’s “No Direction Home” recognizes this as a decisive influence in the poet’s formative years. He uses footage from those drills to drive the point home and Dylan confirms it in interviews.
Even though we were kids, we knew it was absurd at the time, yet the adults piled it on with more stuff like Disney’s “Our Friend the Atom,” a blatant attempt at pro-nuclear-power propaganda in 1957. What a pathetic joke that one was.
Almost as soon as he arrived in Greenwich Village and started singing in nightclubs, Dylan was mixing his recurrent nightmares about World War III into his songs.
These were the early days of the anti-war movement, which — though focused on the Vietnam War — always reflected elements of anti-nuke sentiment as well.
As youngsters, we intuited but were never actually told by our government how close we had repeatedly come to nuclear war until the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. But based on declassified documents, my own youngest son, who just happens to be named Dylan, wrote in a paper while he was earning his Master’s Degree in History that President Eisenhower threatened to drop the bomb on China on more than one occasion in the fifties.
Meanwhile, in Bob D’s main song on the topic the key generational line is “I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.” We all felt like outsiders in a world where the rulers seemed willing to indulge in mutually assured destruction — all that was left for us to do was to comfort each other.
Of course we all had nightmares of ending up, dazed and alone, wandering in a post dystopia. Our solutions — drugs, casual sex, rock ‘n roll, escapism all, or activism, protest music, community organizing, crusading journalism — all blended together as options.
It was somehow assumed that one had to be either a hippie and tune out or a radical and tune in, so of course many of us decided we would instead be both at the same time — hippie-radicals.
That’s when things became dicey and our generation started to spin out violent strike forces like the Weather Underground. Few of us actually supported violence but most of us harbored violent resentment and anger at those Dylan branded as the “Masters of War.”
We also struck out against racial injustice, misogyny, homophobia — hate of all kinds, by advocating love for each other. Other poets besides Dylan spun out their solutions: “Love is All You Need,” etc.
And when it came to love, Dylan seemed somewhat cynical but always ambivalent, with his haunting “Love is Just a Four-Letter Word,” that his once-lover Joan Baez turned into a classic, or the ever-so-tender “Just Like a Woman.”
The truth? Relationships between Baby Boomers have always been complicated. It’s almost as if we can’t be apart but we can’t be together — we tended to have more relationships over our lifespans than previous generations, but our breakups drove divorce rates to record levels as well.
One label older people tagged us with was the“Me Generation.”
I prefer the “We Generation.”
I ain't lookin' to compete with you
Beat or cheat or mistreat you
Simplify you, classify you
Deny, defy or crucify you
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you
We ran in a flock. And we’re still hoping to end up in each another’s dreams.
(This one first appeared in 2022.)
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