Teach Your Children Well

I was a dj on my college radio station, WUSB. I was also the chairman of the Student Activities Board and put on all these great concerts by bands like the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, the Dead, the Airplane, the Byrds, Joni Mitchell, Otis Redding, The Four Tops, Ravi Shankar, Muddy Waters, Love...

I got tapes in the mail... like everyday. In 1969 I was getting ready to cut out and go the Europe before officially graduating. I had heard this new group's first song, "Marrakech Express," and I remember it because I was planning to go there. But I wasn't moved enough by it to ask the band to play, even though I was a big fan of David Crosby from when he was in the Byrds doing songs like 8 Miles High-- which he definately was when the band arrived 2 hours late for a concert. But Crosby, Stills & Nash... eh, I thought.

"Teach Your Children" was on their next album, the first with Neil Young, Déjà Vu. It came out in May of 1970. I had already left Europe (and left Marrakech) and was driving across Asia towards Afghanistan singing...

You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good-bye.
Teach your children well,
Their father's hell did slowly go by

Someone had sent me an advance tape. It spoke to me... big time. After all, I was on the road, driving through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal... I had a code to live by too. I sang along to that song every day. And it was a hit in my van, even though it wasn't out yet.

Sunday I heard former Secretary of State Colin Powell on Fareed Zakaria's CNN show talking about what CSN&Y had been singing about almost 4 decades ago:

"I tell many stories about the kids I talk to and how they're growing up learning not to hate rather than learning to hate. So what we have to do is focus on our young people. Some of the old folks... if that's the way they feel, that's the way they feel; they're not going to change. But we' have to make sure that we're teaching all of our children, in schools, in the home, everywhere, that it is not right to hate in this country. This is a country of love. This is a country of kindness. This is a country that we reach out to each other and we reach out to the rest of the world."

Yes, he's aware of the current regime and who runs it. That's the point of that hippy speech he just made. Watch as he talks about the constitutional "We the people" rather than Trump's narrow, self-serving "Me the president." (Up top.) But is there any reason to believe that Colin Powell's plea to teach the children to love instead of to hate is going to work any better now than it did when Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young sang it in 1970? Trump has the bully pulpit and what the children are hearing today is, I'm afraid, hate, hate, hate. That's what sits in the White House, after millions and millions of our fellow countrymen voted for him-- the ones whose parents, apparently never took "Teach Your Children" all that seriously, if they even heard it at all.