Hard rain

The older I get, the more I think that “A hard rain’s a-gonna fall” is one of the greatest songs ever written.

Bob Dylan has said that he wrote it in 1962, at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, when it seemed that we were on a knife-edge and mightn’t wake up in the morning. So people who haven’t really listened to it think that the hard rain is a rain of bombs, or perhaps a nuclear winter. Perhaps ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard reinforces this view.

But it is a lot more to it, and much of what it says is coming to pass.

Moreover, it is not complicated stuff that needs to be interpreted. The message is very simple. Let me give a few examples.

• hard rain, a black branch: floods and fires in many different parts of the world.
• sad forests, dead oceans, the pellets of poison are flooding their waters: we’ve seen the effects of acid rain, and of plastics, chemicals and human excrement in our rivers and seas.
• ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken: tyrants of every stripe imprison and torture those who disagree with them.
• guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children: think of the child soldiers in wars in east Africa, or the American school shootings.
• the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world: the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 was a hint about this.
• a white man who walked a black dog: remember the pictures from Abu Ghraib after the invasion of Iraq.
• I met one man who was wounded in hatred: enough said; do we have enough sympathy for all the victims?
• the people are many and their hands are all empty: clear enough, I think.
• reflect on the mountains so all souls can see it: the mountains show us very clearly what’s happening, with the shrinking glaciers and disappearing snow caps.
• I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinking: this line makes me think of the picture of a polar bear on a totally inadequate ice flow which will surely melt under it soon.

It is not quite all doom and gloom: a highway of diamonds, I met a young girl who gave me a rainbow. But the predictions are all there. It is surely clear by now that pumping more oil, or shooting people who are slightly different from us, will not make us happy and prosperous.