Feels like a life time has passed since then. Well beyond the passage of years, it’s the alteration of the social terrain which was more drastic than we ever could have predicted. 9/11, devastating in so many ways, remains downright surreal for those of us who knew the World Trade Center well. Everything but our memories crumbled into rubble on that fateful morning, that which was an otherwise perfect late-summer day. New Yorkers can still recall the gentle breeze and sweet, warm scent in the air before the news reports flooded in. Before everything changed…Neither hateful terror nor blind vengeance can ever fully disappear the visceral sounds and emotions which rang through the halls of the Trade Center. Today, with renewed fervor over espionage again threatening our airways, it’s easy to look back and recall not only 2001’s losses, but the history and culture of what once stood high above downtown.

Another December, another Phil Ochs birth anniversary. Wow, he would have been 69 tomorrow. It’s also time for the stream of annual Ochs birthday concerts which have been occurring all over the nation each December since the singer’s untimely death in 1976. The movement has not had Phil Ochs to call upon for a long time, but none on the Left have forgotten his impact—and the impact his music continues to have upon us.

In 1969, as the Beatles were in the process of going through a slow, painful disintegration, John Lennon began to loudly voice his protest against the Vietnam War and speak out in support of radical social change, even as he experienced the full wrath of the Nixon Administration’s ire. Twenty-nine years after his untimely death, Lennon’s music and activism seem more relevant than ever.