Strengthen the Things that Remain?

God don't make promises that He don't keep

 You got some big dreams baby, but in order to dream you gotta still be asleep.

When you gonna wake up, when you gonna wake up

When you gonna wake up strengthen the things that remain?

― Bob Dylan , "When You Gonna Wake Up"

********

Dear Kate,

You shared with me last night someone posting somewhere this Dylan song in response to the latest school shooting, and I wondered what you meant.

Did you mean you agree with those words, or that you feel profound and maybe kinda happy for me that I too have been profound quoting Dylan more than occasionally and now someone else doing the same profundity for a special occasion?

Dylan didn't write those words, they were from the Bible, the last book in the library, and borrowed by a Dylan then who is as strange to me as he probably is to the Dylan now.  The Dylan now goes on tours and watches I Love Lucy on his tour bus "all the time, non-stop."  Joan Baez reportedly tried to persuade him to go back to "fight for the cause," but...who knows what Dylan thinks now.  Maybe he has awakened and found the things that remain don't really worth any strengthening.

You woke this morning, just now, what have you found on your breakfast table worth strengthening?

The gunman, an 18-year-old, has he not experienced the many fine things laid on our table in this land of plenty: family and friends, justice and beauty, devotion and respect, dreams and yearnings, green grass and tall trees, hearty laughs and warm tears, quick sex and long love, vacations and gadgets, fast car and faster lust, church songs and ad jingles, superhero movies and Super Bowl halftimes, Amazon Prime and Netflix, bubble tea and bobble heads, sports and porns, credit cards and, possibly, bitcoins?

There are so many things worth strengthening, why would one choose to barricade himself in a little classroom to kill 19 children and 2 teachers, as if that would address what he wanted to be redressed?

See the screenshot above?  It's from my phone; I took it this morning.  The ad below the news changes every time I open the app anew.  Last night, the first time I learned about the shooting, the ad below it says there are some pictures I should click on, of vacationers in swimsuits that are "for adults only."  Yes, that's already being respectful in the app of a still respectable news network.

Every opportunity there is we look to strengthen the things that remain.  I don't know what Dylan was bitching about.

Yours, Alex