Six days before Donald Trump was elected President of the United
States, Bob Dylan ambled onto the stage of Charleston's Clay
Center Auditorium. Eighteen hundred baby-boomers, a smattering of
Gen Xers like me, and a few millennials here and there provided the
recent Nobel laureate with the obligatory standing ovation as he
stepped into the spotlight. Dylan approached the microphone,
thinking about change.
He introduced himself as "[a] worried man with a worried
mind / No one in front of me and nothing behind." Dylan's
thoughts grew darker and less optimistic from there. The next
stanza saw Dylan: "Standing on the gallows with my head in a
noose / Any minute now I'm expecting all hell to break
loose." Then, in the refrain, the radical defiance my parents
first heard in 1964 on the album The Times They Are
A-Changin' surrendered to resignation and defeat: