Behind the melancholy of old songs

The past week I've been re-watching the PBS documentary, The Vietnam War, together with Dad. It's in 10 parts, a total of 18 hours. As we move through the course of the war, the events increasingly are things that I have memories of. Yesterday's episode spoke of Vietnamization; I remember hearing that word but not knowing (or really caring) what it meant. It also covered the Kent State shooting of student demonstrators by the military, with four dead, also an event I have a vague memory of. The episode ended (I think) with the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song, "Ohio", explicitly about this shooting. The sound of the song is very familiar to me, yet I didn't know what the lyrics said until I first watched this documentary in 2017. "Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, we're finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming. Four dead in Ohio."

Music from my past typically stirs a deep sense of melancholy for me, but this song particularly does. I'd never deeply investigated the stories behind the melancholy, but I did so with "Ohio" last night. Here they are:

Those who sang that song, those who protested, the young adults of that time are the ones who really lived! And I missed it. I was alive, but I wasn't there. I was separate from it. That was where the real life was. Why wasn't I there? I was too young. It's not like those people were necessarily happy but they were really living and I was not in it. I should have been there. If I had been energetic and smart I would have been there. But there is something wrong with me and I wasn't there and I missed out on real love and real life. I had a chance and I blew it. Why didn't I recognize what was happening and see that I was missing out? Why didn't I go there and participate? I was deficient. I didn't know enough. I didn't take action. It's my own fault.

Hmmm, sounds like a variation one of the basic stories that colors my life. Obviously this story doesn't hold water in reality. It illustrates the fantasy I have that it's better to be grown up, and that to be a child, or child-like, is to be horribly vulnerable. This fantasy drives my passion to teach skills to kids, and my occasional lack of discretion in speaking about adult topics with them.