"For Everything that Matters, Carry On"

                          "Carry on my sweet survivor

                           You've carried it so long,

                           So it may come again, carry on

                           Carry on, carry on."

I was too young to be a part of the folk scene of the early 1960s, but I began to tap into the energy of that dream in my grad school days at Golden Gate Baptist Seminary in Mill Valley, California (1978 -1981). By then the "movement" had receded into the shadows. The war had ended, Martin Luther King's birthday was made a federal holiday, and the public sentiment for peace and the common good was giving way to a time of corporate boom. Carrying the torch for social justice was not the "in thing." Public demonstrations and marches had become passé, but some of us saw the need to carry on. We knew that ending the draft and creating public holidays did not automatically create a just society.

So it was that in the 1980s after we had struggled for civil rights and protested the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s that the country put on the brakes. We will usually brake for business, which is why we must be vigilant about justice.

This is a song that helped me during those early Reagan years, and maybe it will speak to some today (from Peter Paul & Mary's Reunion album)

Sweet Survivor

You have asked me why the days fly by so quickly

And why each one feels no different from the last?

And you say that you are fearful for the future

And you have grown suspicious of the past

And you wonder if the dreams we shared together

Have abandoned us or we abandoned them

And you cast about and try to find new meaning

So that you can feel that closeness once again

Carry on my sweet survivor

Carry on my lonely friend

Don't give up on the dream and don't you let it end

Carry on my sweet survivor

Though you know that something's gone

For everything that matters, carry on

You remember when you felt each person mattered

When we all had to care for all was lost

But now you see believers turn to cynics

And you wonder was the struggle worth the cost

Then you see someone too young to know the difference

And a veil of isolation in their eyes

And inside you know you've got to leave them something

Or the hope for something better slowly dies

Carry on my sweet survivor

Carry on my lonely friends

Don't give up on the dream and don't you let it end

Carry on my sweet survivor

Though you know that something's gone

For everything that matters, carry on

Carry on my sweet survivor

You've carried it so long

So it may come again, carry on

Carry on, carry on



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