While I'm not a big fan of geezer rock and golden oldies, I'll be in the Belle on Sunday night when Joan Baez performs.

I will be there for the music. I will be there for nostalgic reasons; after all, Baez, 68, sang "We Shall Overcome" at Woodstock 40 years ago. I'll be there because her voice was an inspiration to so many people in the civil rights movement. And I'll be there because of Baez's war protest songs from the 1960s.

Joan Baez sang her conscience. And in doing so she gave voice to the hopes and fears of many young Americans during Vietnam, myself included.

Lately, I've been looking at the world through the funky colored glass of 1968. I'm running a Joan Baez-Bob Dylan soundtrack in my head while I edit opinion pieces that deal with terrorism, global warming and the rage of shock-talk radio, Internet chats and comments. We're talking 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Obama, mortgage meltdowns (Little Boxes) and dreaded socialized medicine. Time blends and blurs: Vietnam, Ebenezer Baptist Church, the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon and Apollo 7 orbits the Earth 116 times.

We've learned, and we haven't learned. Zen-ish but true.

I've been listen to Baez's latest album, "Day After Tomorrow," released in September. The title cut was written and first recorded by Tom Waits, and there can be no more different voices on the planet than Waits and Baez, but it works.

There's no protest in these new newly recorded Baez songs, written by Steve Earle, Diana Jones, Eliza Gilkyson, Patty Griffin and Waits. As one reviewer described them, they are songs of hope and homecoming. And they are. The songs are spiritual, even religious in nature, leaning heavy on the biblical Mary.

The anger is gone and the spirit restored. We baby boomers are coming full circle, some of us back home to that idealism of our earliest years. It has been a very long journey. A person doesn't get much of a handle on it until something like this Baez concert keys memories and experiences.

For a time while Wall Street was a free-market bull, I thought we had gone off beam in our youthful flirtations with co-op, community and the Whole Earth Catalogue mindset. Given that everyone's 401(k) is in a dark hole today and we're cranking up the wind generators, maybe we were closer to the truth in 1968 than I had begun to understand.

I suggest that when we look at health care reform, we need to be more open to change. And when we see bailouts of the captains of industry, we should be more critical. When someone wants to get into a shooting war, we need to give peace a better ride.

North Dakota has been a conservative place since the mid-1940s. Before that there were roving bands of immigrant entrepreneurs setting up farms, ranches and towns across the prairie. Then bad economic times arrived. North Dakotans who need change (or a livelihood) moved west. The Dust Bowl and economic depression set in, followed by World War II. Streams of North Dakota with an itch headed either places like Spokane, Wash., and Lodi, Calif., to work in war industries. All that outmigration of people more willing to change, more likely to be entrepreneurs, solidified a conservative mindset among those remaining North Dakotans. (The preceding is a glib paraphrase of research and writing by Dickinson State College business professor Debora Dragseth.)

But in recent years, forced by circumstances, North Dakotan have become more aggressive in job creation, global marketing and in business and industry in general. We've become business entrepreneurs, again, like our immigrant forefathers and foremothers.

But our politics, cultural preferences and social understanding remain firmly planted in a red state.

Joan Baez's visit to Bismarck-Mandan would be a good time to be thinking blue.

(Ken Rogers' column appears each Saturday. Contact him at ken.rogers@bismarcktribune.com.)