I recently learned that some of my parents’ friends* from the glorious decade of the 1960s are reading my blog. Far be it from me to name-check – we here at SOS never drop anything, especially not names – but I strongly suggest that, in celebration of these folks and their groundbreaking era of struggle for civil rights in this country, without which** we would not have the political landscape that made possible the candidacy and the victory of our wonderful President-elect Obama, we all go to YouTube and watch Tim Armstrong and Skye Sweetnam singing “Into Action.” Not only does the song celebrate the general premise of Getting Stuff Done, it shouts out to the NorCal Bay Area, from whence these, er, mavericks came, where the ebullient dreamscape of my heart resides, where I will live again one day if I have to boil my cowboy boots and make a soup to do it. Well, maybe not my Portland cowboy boots. But you know what I mean.

*If any of these legendary folks are reading, they should comment. That’d be so cool. Davis, baby! Davis!

**I’m not saying that my parents’ friends, or the Sixties, are in any way directly responsible for Obama’s election. I’m just saying that the movement for change has a history and that that decade is part of that history, and I want to celebrate that history, this month, while we celebrate his election too. I spent many years feeling like we, my generation, had lost the spirit of the Sixties.
Now I know we never did.