War Babies: Prophets of Peace

 This article was originally published in the Toronto Star, Sunday 12/29/2019

-- By Tom Phillips

Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, c.1963

The 1960's turn sixty in 2020, with their meaning and value still in hot dispute. It might help to divide the decade in two; the first half peace and love, the last fear and loathing. Still, in both phases, the Sixties were an age of prophecy.

Bob Dylan sang “The answer is blowin’ in the wind.”  Simon and Garfunkel saw “the words of the prophets written on the subway walls.”  New voices came out of nowhere, and found rapt listeners in the massive generation born after World War Two, the baby boomers. 

The prophets were not boomers themselves.  They were the big brothers and sisters of the boomers, the relatively small generation born during the war.  As elders, they knew from an early age that their voices would be heard. And they knew the world they were born into was not fit for future generations. Children of war, they became prophets of peace.  

Birth rates in North America plunged in wartime, before soaring in the late forties. Despite that, the war years produced a generation of artists who astonished the world as they re-invented popular music and poetry in the Sixties.  

Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Joni Mitchell, Aretha Franklin, Joan Baez, Carole King, Simon and Garfunkel, Frank Zappa, Jerry Garcia, Brian Wilson, Bob Marley and Neil Young were all born between 1940 and 1945. To these must be added at least one non-musical prophet, Muhammad Ali. And that's just the top of the list. These children of war spoke with an authority that came not from schooling or privilege, but from an inner confidence that they could speak the truth, to anyone. 

It might be argued that great artists are born all the time, and this age was no different.  But prophetic ages are actually rare.  For example, if you scan the entire roster of famous baby boomers – born between 1946 and 1965 – you’ll find no voices like those listed above.  Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Madonna and Michael Jackson all reflected their times, but did little or nothing to change them.

In 1964, a Berkeley activist coined the phrase "Don't trust anyone over 30."  To boomers who were just starting to turn 18 and enter the military draft, this pointed to their parents' generation. Boomers saw their parents physically and emotionally wounded by lifetime of depression and war, now stuck in a consumer "rat race," simultaneously sacrificing for their children's futures and hunkering down for a World War Three that would destroy the world. Many boomers felt pity for their parents.  

They turned instead to their immediate elders, just a few years ahead of them. We children of war (I was born in 1942) saw our parents' generation as people who sacrificed too much, who lived with a pessimism and fatalism born of their experience, not ours.  We made up our minds on some level not to accept that reality.  I didn't have the kind of talent that could make their world hear my defiance.  But others my age did, and the world did hear them. 

In 2020 those war babies will start to turn 80.  Few in numbers, their influence has been outsized, partly because of the power of their vision, but also because of an accident of history: the outsized number of their followers.  In the US and Canada alone, nearly 90 million children were born between 1946 and 1965.    

Where is the next generation of prophets?  The biblical prophet Isaiah wrote, "Before my people call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear."  It may be divine intercession, or just a confluence of circumstance that produces prophecy.  But we'll know the voice when we hear it -- speaking unbidden, not saying the "right things," but things that never entered our minds, yet we know are true.

-- Copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips