THE CHEAP SEATS with STEVE CAMERON: Perhaps ‘the answer’ is coming, six decades later
We’re coming up on an anniversary.
On July 9, 1962, Bob Dylan first recorded a song he claimed to have written in 10 minutes.
Dylan had sung it for a live audience several months earlier at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village.
When he introduced it at Gerde’s, the 22-year-old Dylan told the curious audience: “This here ain’t no protest song or anything like that, ’cause I don’t write no protest songs.”
He was wrong.
“Blowin’ in the Wind” became one of most iconic protest songs of all time — and spoke directly to that era’s qualms about the Vietnam War, along with an ongoing cry against racial injustice.
“Yes, and how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?”
In the same decade of the song’s debut, both Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated.
Riots blazed across America.
THUS, IT appeared the questions in Dylan’s song seemed doomed to have no permanent answers.
Yet here we are, nearly six decades later…
Dylan is still around to watch, a Nobel Prize winner, as we find ourselves staring at what could be a transformative time in national (even global) history, as millions in the United States and elsewhere are protesting systemic racism — especially against Black men by various judicial processes.
The tipping point will be remembered as the cold-blooded killing of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis policeman, as three of his fellow officers stood and watched.
Just days later, leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives knelt for eight minutes, 46 seconds — the exact time Chauvin had his knee on Floyd’s neck.
But I should leave the sociopolitical side of the current story to people covering it on the ground, and stick to sports, because…
Just the groundswell in our little slice of the world is immense.
Roger Goodell, commissioner of the National Football League, has publicly apologized for getting it all wrong when Colin Kaepernick knelt to protest police violence against people of color in 2016.
As several voices across the sports spectrum have repeated: “It was never about the flag, or the anthem.”
Goodell even spoke aloud the three words his critics wanted to hear: “Black lives matter.”
Virtually everyone in the league now plans to kneel or otherwise protest during the national anthem if/when we have pro football again — and it will not only come with the league’s blessing, but there are rumblings that Goodell will kneel in solidarity with his players.
If hearing such words from the boss of the NFL wasn’t enough, how about NASCAR responding to calls from most of its drivers, and banning the Confederate battle flag from all its races and grounds?
A couple months ago, you’d have laughed off that possibility as sheer fantasy.
Just those two anecdotes almost scream that we’ve come to a time in history when systemic racism could become almost extinct.
NO ONE is claiming that racism can now be eradicated completely.
Maybe not ever.
Individuals are (and should be) free to think and speak as they please — as long as they don’t advocate violence.
We all have First Amendment rights.
You can stand on street corners and holler about white nationalism, and no one — not even athletes from football or basketball, now predominantly Black sports at the pro level — would claim you’re breaking the law.
Ah, but SYSTEMIC racism, where bias is built into law enforcement, justice, public education, voting rights and so forth…
That should be corrected once and for all, and signs now suggest it could happen, and…
Judging from surveys, along with non-stop protests and marches, so is America’s white population.
“It was always going to take our white brothers and sisters to make change happen,” said Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson.
“Now that could be real.”
Dylan’s song did inspire opposition that helped to end the Vietnam War, and now some of its questions appear to be getting responses on racial justice.
For its part, the sports world is saying...
Now.
“Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn’t see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind…”
Email: scameron@cdapress.com
Steve Cameron’s “Cheap Seats” columns appear in The Press on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. “Moments, Memories and Madness,” his reminiscences from several decades as a sports journalist, runs each Sunday.
Steve also writes Zags Tracker, a commentary on Gonzaga basketball, once per month during the offseason.