The anti-war movement needs music.

The shaking windows and rattling walls in 2005 reverberate from ever-stronger percussions about what the United States is doing — or not — at home and abroad. Flashbacks to 1968 haunt the moment. A boomer would be remiss — and dismissed — if she were to say that the '00s are the '60s reincarnate. But the uncertainty, anger, fear, outrage and sorrows spawned by the mad rush of events make 2005 feel like the defining year 1968 circling back on itself.

The ethos proves itself inescapable in a place like the American Friends Service Committee exhibit "Eyes Wide Open," spread on the sloping west lawn at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul today and Saturday. In row on row, pairs of combat boots represent the members of the U.S. military who have fallen in Iraq. Hugging next to these sentinels of sorrow, a circle of boots from Upper Midwest fatalities are grouped so the visitor can grasp a feeling for the 113 of our children, parents, neighbors who have died in Iraq. Combat boots, 1,928 pair in all. The unknown number of civilian casualties have notice in winding rows that circle, then spill down the hillside, some with names attached, some small, some stylish. Walk along and you might find a pair like one in your closet, as I did Thursday.

The great marches against the American war in Vietnam echo now, too. Last week, Washington filled with protest. This week, protesters provoked their own arrest outside the White House.

The whole world is watching, as it did in the 1968 uprisings from the streets of Prague, Paris, Chicago …. But where now are the sounds as good as those of John Fogerty, Bob Dylan, the young Joan Baez? Pete Seeger? Peter, Paul and Mary? Where are the successors to John Lennon's "Revolution" and "Give Peace a Chance?"

Where's the new music to march by, to rally with? Where are the metaphors that move words into human action?

Now we get unimaginative echoes by artists who might not even know where "Fortunate Son" came from for their allusions to President Bush. Now we get punked-up and hip-hopped by plugging individually into iPods but we have no authentic new voice for the streets.

In the Martin Scorsese documentary "No Direction Home" about Dylan, Studs Terkel is heard interviewing Dylan. Terkel says, "All your songs are about more than the event."

In the same film, Baez explains those times, "We really thought that as songwriters, we were going to change the world."

They did.

Back in the day, music raised wrath that poured out of concerts, records and radios onto the streets, inspiring the civil rights movement and challenging the U.S. government's unjust prosecution of war in Southeast Asia.

In this day, the best of younger generations that we have is Green Day, Bad Religion and Lagwagon.

Yes, rockers are still doing good in the world, bringing their celebrity to social causes and urgent relief efforts. But awareness and fund raising, while needed in this battered world, are not the same as generating music that raises collective hell. Bob Geldof, rocker-turned-humanitarian, says in the TV film on protest and pop music, "Get Up, Stand Up," that Dylan's "explosion of ideas" in song "entered the culture as a way to articulate whole political ideas."

The year 2005 needs songs to guide the feet, to hold to the heart, to articulate whole political ideas that challenge hubris as a foreign policy and plutocracy-enrichment as domestic policy. New songs. Songs that take their heritage seriously, as did the protest songs of the 1960s and 1970s.

Is there not in the mind of a musical artist just one anthem as great as "We Shall Overcome?"

Holste is associate editor of the editorial page.

© 2005 St. Paul Pioneer Press