I was just thinking…Where have all the flowers gone?

Many songsters like Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul, and Mary asked question in turbulent ‘60s. We still have no answer.

By: Norma Adams-Wade

OK. Enough of this lamenting bygone days! “Make America great again.” “Back in the day, we…” “I remember when…” Yes, the world has lost much of its vintage essence. But, snap out of it! Let’s move on! But before we move, consider the question is: Move on to where?

The reality is: We must deal with the life that we have now. I did not say accept it. I said deal with it. Our strategy? Let’s open our ears to the ancestors who admonish us to honor the Sankofa bird tradition. The bird’s head looks back with a new-life egg in its mouth while its body moves forward. The underlying message is to look back and fetch wisdom from the past so that it will empower you to wisely move forward toward your future.

Been here before in ‘60s: war, entertainment
Turn the spotlight now on songwriter/singer Pete Seeger and songsters Peter, Paul and Mary. The then-popular trio sang “If I Had A Hammer,” and “Blowing in the Wind.” At the 1963 March on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his historic “I Have A Dream” speech.

But in this instance, let’s consider another of the trio’s ‘60s anti-war protest folksongs where they ask the probing question, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

The underlying message during that Vietnam War era signaled an alarm. The mournful message lamenting the futility of war. It warned humanity that we must pay attention to how wars destroy the cycle of life and lead promising youths to burial grounds where flowers cover graves instead of flourishing in beautiful open fields or wedding bouquets.

I was just thinking… as in the song, I ask the same question today. Where are the flowers? Where is our nation’s respect for life, community, unity? Where is caring, empathy? Where…commitment to honor, integrity?

The Vietnam War was a hot-button, bipolar issue that kept neighbors, relatives, friends and foes at each other’s throats in that turbulent vacuum when the world seemed on the brink of destruction.

That tension lasted through the terms of about five U. S. Presidents from Dwight Eisenhower in the mid-50s to Gerald Ford in the late ‘70s.

The bipolar nation on one hand saw hippies, beatniks and “flower children” touting multicultural unity, free love, peace, psychedelic drugs, and unkempt long-hair appearances. The flip side projected parents fearful that their kids had gone to devil. This while the Vietnam War’s end raged and true racial integration was still far off.

Current events then included actress Jane Fonda publicly protesting against the Vietnam war, iconic 1969 Woodstock festival, trend-setting 1968 Broadway musical Hair with its unconventional nude scene, Hippies living a Bohemian lifestyle in “the age of Aquarius.”

Cultural breakthroughs

What else is there to learn as the Sankofa bird looks back at that divisive ‘60s war era? Television and movies began signaling cultural breakthroughs. The 1950s segregation era was exiting — when Harry S. Truman was President and the nation had touted the buffoonish Amos ‘n’ Andy TV series that featured the nation’s first all-Black cast. Later, way more than a dozen Afrocentric TV sitcoms set a new trend – from Julia with Diahann Carroll, beginning in 1968 to Black-ish more than 40 years later in 2014, created by film writer Kenya Barris, a Clark Atlanta University HBCU graduate.

On the music scene, the Beatles were basking in the spotlight, as were Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, The Temptations, The Supremes, Stevie Wonder, The Jackson 5…..you get my drift. Movie stars in the forefront included Sidney Poitier, Billy Dee Williams, Pam Grier, and Richard Roundtree to name a few.

What have we learned?

Today, more than six decades later, political and cultural conflicts have us again wondering if society will survive the violence and animosities that surrounds us.

Being the Sankofa bird again, I would look back to learn from the 1939 classic movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The plot details a salt-of-the-earth, honest, country boy who ends up as a U. S. senator in a corrupt Washington D. C. environment. Mr. Smith wages a tough, exhausting battle. against the crookedness he finds and ultimately wins the battle. The movie’s flowery, redeeming message is that individual integrity and the power of “the people” can ultimately win over entrenched, unethical power.

So, where have those flowers gone today? Do “the people” today have the power to redeem what increasingly appears to be unchecked, nefarious, mercenary power?

I leave you with words often misattributed to Nelson Mandela and Hillary Clinton. The words actually were expressed originally by author Marianne Williamson in her best-selling 1992 book A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles. Williamson wrote:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

I will add, …And “the people” said: Amen.

Dallasite Norma Adams-Wade is a Texas Metro News senior correspondent, The Dallas Morning News retired writer, and a National Association of Black Journalists founder.