Reverend Tim W. Jensen

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

January 21, 1996

There's a radio station here in Portland whose slogan is: "The way Rock and Roll was meant to be heard -- squeezed down and blasted through some crappy AM radio." The reason I am privy to this particular information is that both of our children were home visiting from college this Christmas, so for most of the month of December every time I stepped into my car I had the distinct and unaccustomed pleasure of having this station blasted out at me through what I had always felt was a fairly-decent state-of-the-art factory-installed car stereo, but which my audiophile son assures me qualifies as crap within the context of the promotional announcement.

Don't get me wrong -- I didn't really mind listening to a month's worth of Alternative Rock while the kids were home from school. It was certainly a lot better than the other alternative they proposed, which would have been me picking the radio station and letting them drive. I saw it as a learning experience: one of those rare opportunities where, if you can just keep your mouth shut and your ears open, you are exposed to all sorts of amazing things that you probably weren't meant to hear. These bands have amazing names: names like "Radiohead" and "Sonic Youth," "Smashing Pumpkins," "Toad the Wet Sprocket," "Alice in Chains" and "Jane's Addiction," "Green Apple Quickstep.…" And they don't exactly play catchy little toe-tapping jingles either. This is the kind of hard-pounding Rock & Roll music that makes you want to fling yourself headfirst into a Mosh Pit and be passed along overhead on the hands of you fellow dancers.

If anything, it reminds me an awful lot of the so-called "garage bands" that were popular among my friends when we were the age my kids are now. Bands also with iconoclastic names long lost to memory, whose mottoes often seemed to be "if you can't play well, you can at least play loud." (Of course, the technology is so much better now than it was in my day. But some of us, at least, were wearing long, stringy hair and scraggly beards, flannel shirts, torn jeans and steel-toed workboots a decade before "grunge" was anything more than an adjective describing the kind of thing you might find in the grouting while cleaning bathroom tile. And if any of you young whippersnappers don't believe me, my mother has the snapshots to prove it!)

In any event, I asked my daughter, (who I felt might be a little more tolerant of my aesthetic ignorance than her brother) to explain to me exactly what was meant by this slogan "Squeezed down and blasted through some crappy AM radio."

"You know," she said. "Like blasted real loud through a crappy AM radio, without a lot of elevator music or stuff like that."

"Oh," I said. "I thought there might be a little more to it than that."

"Nope," she said. "That's about it."

But I want there to be more, and I'm not really sure why. Maybe it's just the time of year, or maybe it's the realization that this January is the January "My Generation" begins to turn 50. A half-century of Baby Boomers, and rather than becoming the people our parents warned us about, more often than not we've become our parents instead. The majority of today's most innovative Rock musicians weren't even born when Bob Dylan announced that "The times, they are a-changin'…" and told us "the answer my friend, is blowin' in the wind." The moon was in the seventh house and Jupiter aligned with Mars: the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War…we just couldn't understand why the generation that came before us, a generation who had survived the Great Depression and defeated Hitler, never quite caught on that there was more to life than making lots of money and using military power to impose our will on people weaker than ourselves.

"Turn on, tune in, and drop out…" Or was it tune in, turn on?… You know, I just can't remember anymore. The times really have changed, haven't they? Naive Idealism is displaced by a Cynical Realism: today's rebellious youth dances to anthems like that of Smashing Pumpkins' lead singer Billy Corgan: "Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage." Meanwhile, I look at my own kids, who are basically pretty good kids (even if they are Preacher's Kids) -- responsible, communicative, high academic achievers, relatively drug and alcohol free -- and the temptation to criticize their hair (or lack thereof), their clothes, their music, is almost overwhelming. About the only thing that enables me to keep my mouth shut is the foreknowledge of the kind of response I will receive, that infuriating roll of the eyes and dismissive shake of the head, as if to say: "I can't believe what I'm hearing -- you're going to have to do a lot better than that to justify the amount of space you take up on the planet, you old fossil."

Is it just the perennially arrogant ingratitude of youth? Or is some more subtle, Karmic irony at work? The Age of Aquarius has become the age of the Infiniti, the Acura, and the Lexis. My first car radio came attached to a red, 1962 Plymouth Valiant station wagon. It had five programmable buttons: three AM, two FM; the sound blasted out at us through a solitary speaker located in the middle of the dashboard. We used to squeeze into the car, crank down the windows, crank up the volume, and head out on the highway looking for adventure. Today's cars have eight-speaker digital Dolby quadraphonic sound systems and computerized environmental controls that can regulate the temperature in the passenger compartment down to the tenth of a degree. So what's the first thing young people do when they get behind the wheel? Crank down the windows and crank up the tunes, so they can feel the beat of the music above the roar of the wind. So what's changed? What's really changed?

I don't, by the way, drive a Lexus. I drive a green, 1992 Ford Escort station wagon, and my kids treat my car radio like an object of ridicule. I have eight different Public Radio stations programmed into my radio: one from Seattle, one from Tacoma, two in Eugene, one in Corvallis, and three right here in Portland -- one that plays jazz, one that plays classical, and of course the flagship of Oregon Public Broadcasting, KOPB. There are three different talk radio stations: one news, one sports, and one both news and sports. Two country stations, a Christian station, another jazz station, an "oldies" station, a low-power station in Hillsboro that broadcasts both boys and girls Metro league High School basketball games, and (naturally) KINK-FM. The other day I had a phone call from a woman in Seattle who said she worked for a consumer research organization that was gathering information about the radio listening habits of people in the Portland area, and did I have a few minutes.

"At last," I thought.

She asked her first question. "Are you a male between the ages of sixteen and thirty-seven?"

I thought about lying, then admitted I was not.

"Thank you for your cooperation," she said, and hung up!

In any event, I've been thinking quite a bit about change here lately, now that I am apparently no longer a member of an age group with attractive consumer demographics. And this certainly is the season for reflecting on change and transition. How many of you are still keeping up with your New Years resolutions? January is a natural time for turning over a new leaf, just as Janus was the Roman god in charge of doorways, thresholds, and new beginnings. Come January we take the plunge, leap the barrier, break on through to the other side. Of course, for some of us, once a year is simply not enough. I tend to make resolutions at least five times a year: once in January and again in April, on the Summer Solstice, Labor Day weekend, and on my birthday in October. The resolutions themselves really don't change that much. They are probably pretty similar to your own: spend less, save more, lose weight, get in shape, clean out the garage, and that closet, and those drawers in the desk in the kitchen. I'd like to think its the thought that counts, but I know this isn't true. The problem with actually achieving your resolutions is that you need to keep thinking of new ones to replace them. When I was still smoking, New Years resolutions were a snap. One I had quit, for keeps, a whole new assortment of opportunities for self-improvement opened up before me. It was too much. It was almost enough to make me start smoking again.

Of course, they also say that the more things change, the more they remain the same. The real irony behind this proverb is that the one thing that changes most dramatically in our lives is ourselves. Yet we only tend to notice these changes when we are reminded of them by the things around us. How many of you can remember the first time you were treated by a physician younger than yourself, or maybe were pulled over for a traffic ticket by a cop who really didn't seem old enough to be a cop? It's not that doctors or police officers are getting any younger. The only thing that's changed is you, despite the fact that you still see yourself as the same person you've always been.

I think this is the reason why, in the old Roman iconography, that Janus is typically characterized as having two faces. One face looks forward, and the other behind; but in addition there's this sense of yet another dimension to this two-faced God: that for every new thing we gain through change, there is also something that we sacrifice as well. This is relatively easy to observe in the changes we see around us. Build a dam; give up wild salmon. It's much more difficult to observe the cost of the changes that take place within us.

The one thing constant in life is change. And it seems as though change is taking place more rapidly all the time. It's a particularly difficult situation for a basically change-resistant individual like myself, who quite frankly (with the exception perhaps of the absence of things like antibiotics, which we all now take for granted) would have been just as content to have lived in the nineteenth century as now. Yet whether we embrace change or resist it, perceive it as progress or declension, are aware of the shifts that are taking place around us, or merely drift along with the currents of history, change is inevitable, and will both ignore us and embrace us regardless of whether we chose to ignore or embrace it.

The remarkable thing about youth is not that they are so much more in touch with change, but rather that they have seen so little of it. Unlike some of us old geezers, who are beginning to wonder if some things will ever change, young people are basically experiencing the world for the first time, encountering it as a fait accompli , and forming very strong opinions about what they find. And this is what makes them such astute barometers of the changes taking place in our society. We see our own lives reflected back to us in the lives of our children, and for some of us, frankly, it is pretty darn embarrassing. There is nothing like a teenaged child of your own to make you appreciate the patience of your parents. Or perhaps to inspire you into therapy yourself, so that maybe you can change some of the patterns you learned as a youngster, before you were old enough to know better. Maya Angelou said it beautifully: "History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again." The things from our past can never be changed. But that does not mean that we should let them rule the future.

A few years ago, just before I started back to graduate school again, I saw a letter in the newspaper to one of those advice columnists -- Dear Abby or Ann Landers, I can't remember which -- that went something like this: "All my life I've wanted to be a doctor, but instead I dropped out of college when I was 20 and joined the Army, where I worked as a paramedic. I sometimes still think about becoming a doctor, but by the time I finish college and get through medical school, complete my internship and a three-year residency, I will be over 40 years old. What should I do?" The response was a short one: "You say if you go back to school to become a doctor you will be over 40 years old before you finish. How old will you be if you don't go?" Although we can't always control every change that happens in our lives, we always have the power to initiate change ourselves. And this is the great miracle of being living, changing Beings.

My own kids are now both safely off to school again themselves, and I don't have to worry about the color of their hair, or what time they got in last night, or any of the hundred other things their bright minds can devise to keep me on my toes. My car radio is my own again, and I'm free to play whatever I like. I want you all to know, however, that I've decided to make a little change in the programming. I'm going to keep the station that plays Alternative Rock; I'm going to use it to replace the one that sometimes airs Rush Limbaugh. I'm going to do it for two reasons (aside from the obvious one, of course). The first is to remind me that I was young once myself. And the second to remind me that I am no longer as young as I was. And together, perhaps, these reminders will be enough to let me grow and change from where I am right now, rather than constantly comparing myself to my past, or to a different future that might have been, if only things hadn't changed.…

Copyright © 2000, Reverend Tim W. Jensen. All rights reserved.