“We thought we could change this world with words like ‘love’ and ‘freedom.’ We were part of the lonely crowd inside the Sad Cafe.”
When the Eagles recorded and performed “The Sad Cafe” in 1979, the world of which they sang was already gone.
The world we were hoping to build in the late ’60s and early ’70s, a world without racism, a world without poverty, a world of equal opportunities for men and women, that world never came to pass.
We got a world where middle-aged men could wear blue jeans, where hair over the collar and the ears was acceptable, where smoking marijuana was no longer a big deal.
The changes were all things that didn’t matter.
The things that mattered didn’t change at all.
“Some of their dreams came true, some just passed away and some of them stayed behind inside the Sad Cafe.”
If the ’60s died with Altamont and Kent State, what followed started out bad and got worse. Disco, cocaine and herpes led to the Reagan Era, which led to yuppies, AIDS and an age of materialism unmatched in a hundred years.
Of course, the idealists who wanted to change the world were never more than a minority. Unless people are living in a truly untenable society, most folks are looking only for evolutionary change. You get older, you get a better job, make more money and eventually have a lifestyle about as successful as your parents had.
Add to that that the ’60s may have been the most prosperous era for more people in American history.
The real revolutionaries were never even a majority of college students.
“The clouds rolled in and hid that shore. Now that Glory Train, it don’t stop here no more. Now I look at the years gone by and wonder at the powers that be. I don’t know why fortune smiles on some and lets the rest go free.”
If you look at the ’60s radicals who scared the crap out of mainstream America, what’s amazing is how un-radical they really were. Students for a Democratic Society was seen as wanting truly radical change, but if you look at the Port Huron Statement, the manifesto SDS created in 1962 at its inception, seems almost conservative in retrospect.
Fewer than 100 words in, they praise the power of nuclear energy as a way to help create the future.
Hardly a Communist Manifesto II.
And look what we came away with. More than 600 billionaires in the U.S., some of them worth more than $100 billion.
And Donald Trump as our primary political figure.
We truly live in the Sad Cafe.