I was driving home recently when Barry McGuire’s Eve of Destruction came up on my playlist. I hadn’t heard it for quite a while, but as I listened, I was struck by how familiar it sounded. Not because the world it described was the same as the one we live in today (the song was released in 1965), but because the anxiety behind it was.
Eve of Destruction became one of the anthems of the 60s.
It’s a song about war, nuclear weapons, racial tension, political violence and a generation wondering where the world was heading. I recall talking to my grandpa, a First World War veteran, about the end of the world. I can only imagine what he thought of the rantings of this grade 6 child, having experienced what must have felt like the end of the world while serving.
Listening to Eve of Destruction in 2026, I found myself thinking that although the circumstances have changed enormously, the feeling that the world is somehow on the brink of disaster hasn’t changed very much at all. In fact, as my favourite person said when I discussed it with her, we are always ‘dancing on a pin ’, and that really we are only a step away from some form of disaster, whether it’s man-made or natural.
In 1965, the Cold War was at its height. The United States and the Soviet Union had enough nuclear weapons to destroy each other and all of us many times over. The Vietnam War was escalating; we had the draft, thankfully I was too young, but my favourite person’s brothers weren’t! On the other side of the world, the civil rights struggle was exposing deep divisions within American society. The assassination of President Kennedy was still fresh in people’s minds, and all of this was being presented in our living rooms via television.
Even as a pre-teenager, it felt quite literally as if we were on the eve of destruction, but we survived. The world didn’t end, and in fact we went through a period of peace and greater harmony.
However, that doesn’t mean those fears were irrational. The dangers we faced were real. The possibility of nuclear war was real. The Vietnam War was real. The social divisions and violence were real. We had every reason to be concerned about what was happening around us.
We did not know how it would end up then, and we don’t now.
We often look at our own time and assume the problems we face are somehow unprecedented (a word I think is much overused these days). Of course, while the planet is the same one we lived on in 1965, not much else is. That said, the sense that everything is becoming too difficult, too dangerous and too divided is not new.
Today there are wars in Europe and the Middle East, increasing tensions between major powers, nuclear weapons, economic uncertainty and deep political and social divisions. There is a growing sense in many countries that institutions and leaders cannot be trusted, and that the arguments between different parts of society are becoming harder to bridge.
I think the sense of impending doom and destruction is also made more front of mind is because of the ever increasing and immediate ways that we receive information.
In 1965, if something happened on the other side of the world, we might read about it in the newspaper the following morning or hear about it on the evening news. I recall that when Cyclone Tracey hit Darwin on Christmas Eve 1974, we heard about it within a few hours only because my father was responsible for that region in his job. Otherwise, it would have been the next day that we heard it or read about it. Today, we’d know almost instantaneously.
Today, before we’ve even finished breakfast, we can learn about a war, a political crisis, a natural disaster, or some terrible event thousands of kilometres away, and then get updates throughout the day.
We have access to more information than any previous generation, but rather than giving us a sense of security, it’s done the complete opposite. We are constantly reminded of things over which we have almost no control. Doomscrolling is just too easy.
Still, something about history reassures me. When we look backwards, we know the outcome. We know that the Cuban Missile Crisis ended without nuclear war. We know that the Vietnam War eventually ended. We know that the Cold War eventually came to an end. We know that the people who lived through the turmoil of the 1960s went on to live normal lives.
We got married. We raised children. We went to work, bought houses, took holidays and worried about money. We listened to music, and argued about politics. We wonder what sort of world our children and grandchildren will inherit.
By and large we have lived ordinary lives in what seems like extraordinary times (another overused term), yet today it does feel like we too are on the Eve of Destruction.
We don’t know which of today’s problems will eventually be regarded as turning points, which will be resolved, which will get worse and which will simply disappear from the headlines as something else takes their place.
I know that I can spend too much time thinking about things I cannot control. It is very easy to look at the world and start imagining all the things that could go wrong. Once you start down that path, there is always another problem to consider and another reason to be worried. It’s a spiral to doom and gloom.
I have found that my renewed faith has provided a quiet counterbalance to the fears, anxieties and concerns of the world we live in.
It doesn’t give me the certainty that everything will turn out exactly as I would like. Nor do I believe that trusting God means that bad things won’t happen. Life clearly doesn’t work that way. People suffer, things go wrong, and sometimes the prayers we offer don’t produce the answer we hoped for.
For me, faith is less about having all the answers and more about accepting that I don’t have to. There is a certain freedom in that.
It also doesn’t mean ignoring the world or sticking my head in the sand.
Returning to Barry McGuire’s Eve of Destruction. The song was not wrong about the dangers of its time. Some of those dangers were very real indeed. What nobody in 1965 could know was what would happen next.
The people listening to it in 1965 couldn’t see the future any more clearly than we can.
They simply had to live in the time they had been given, and they did.
Not everything turned out well. As history tells us, there were wars, deaths, political failures and enormous social costs. Some of the problems of the 1960s were not solved; they simply changed form, but we have made genuine progress on many of those challenges. We have adapted, changed, and been resilient, and have by and large continued on despite the challenges we face.
One thing we lose sight of when we are immersed in the news is that it focuses on doom, but rarely gives equal screen time to the response. So often, we see the problem but not the people working to solve it. We see the uncertainty, but not the possibilities beyond it.
We also tend to forget how often previous generations looked at the world and thought things could not possibly get much worse. Imagine those caught in World War 1, the Jews in Germany in the dark days of the 1930s and early 1940s, and the famines that Africa has faced. I could go on. Sometimes it got worse, but thankfully often it didn’t. People carried on; they showed resilience, making the best of what they had.
So I don’t think the lesson from Eve of Destruction is that we should dismiss today’s problems or simply assume everything will be alright. That would be too easy, and probably too complacent. The problems we face are real, and some will require difficult choices and significant changes.
But we shouldn’t assume that because the problems are serious, disaster is inevitable. Truthfully, we just don’t know, and perhaps that really is the point
We can mistake fear about the future for knowledge of the future. They are not the same thing.
As I listened to the last part of the song, I found myself thinking about the people who heard it in 1965, including myself. We couldn’t know that some sixty years later someone, being me, would be driving home listening to the same song and reflecting on how familiar its concerns still seemed.
We couldn’t know what the next sixty years would bring, and we can’t know what the next sixty years will bring either.
While every generation believes it’s on the eve of destruction, the song from 1965 reminds us that ours isn’t the first generation to feel the world is becoming too dangerous to survive, and because I don’t really believe we are on the eve of destruction, I don’t believe we will be the last either.
You never know; the Crows might even win an AFL Premiership at some point in the future!
Note:
- Barry McGuire. Image source: Wikipedia
- Nuclear explosion, Maralinga, SA, https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/maralinga