A Glass Half-Empty

This just came up on my iPod the other day (yes, I've got plays on there next to the musics) and struck me with its resonance:

To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it ... to that quaint period, the thirties, where the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down onthe fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.

And, also courtesy of the iPod, I heard these lines anew:

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'

Williams and Zimmerman: oracles for the ages.