In his elegy for the first days of the first year of the First World War, “MCMXIV,” Philip Larkin says “never such innocence again.” But he was wrong.

I say that because of the reports of young protesters in Hong Kong, South America and Iran, and the use of the phrase “people power.” The protesters are almost always young, innocence is often reborn, but I am old and what I hear in reports of their exploits is innocence doomed yet again.

In my youth, I heard that phrase. In the days of flower power and black power and people power there were marches and optimism and the singing of newly made anthems, giddy optimism and steely resolve, but an imbalance of power.

Perhaps I was born cynical or pessimistic or was simply, as I think, a realist, as Twain said, “An optimist who did not arrive.” I, too, thought Vietnam and racism and plenty of other social ills were wrong and ripe for repair, but I did not believe a children’s crusade was going to bring down “the establishment.”

Maybe I’d just paid attention in history class or had noticed that the protesters had better songs but Nixon had guns, tanks, bomber death planes riding shotgun in the sky, not to mention the DOJ, the CIA, the FBI. So it was no surprise to me when Kent State idealists and innocent bystanders 37 miles from my hometown wound up dead on the ground, having learned a fatal lesson about the efficacy of people power.

The war only ended when it became too expensive politically, when the silent majority got sick of watching failure, futility and atrocities on the evening news and 20,000 coffins being unloaded at Dover Air Force Base, when Nixon’s crimes were revealed to be too numerous, consequential, and undeniable to overlook any longer.

So I sympathize now wth the latest generation of idealists, but I believe China will crush Hong Kong dissidents if they don’t kowtow to Emperor XI, the ayatollahs of Iran will have their way so long as the Islamic Revolutionary Guards stay loyal. and those demanding reform in various economically troubled places may riot, loot and burn, but until they are a majority or the tools of repression and inequality lay down their arms they will be disappointed — or dead.

I am sad to say that I expect to see a wave of crackdowns, the imposition of orthodoxies, harshly enforced intolerance of dissent, and the massacre of more innocents. Not so long ago, a coalition of believers in representative government and human rights would at least have raised a cry against such behavior, with the United States in the lead.

Now the voices of support from what we used to call “the free world” are muted and America no longer leads but often seems to side with the tyrants — to give a pass to Putin, Xi, Kim, Erdogan. Is this due to war weariness, or to the triumph of economic interest over human interest, or of power politics over power to the people?

Whatever the cause for our retreat into timidity or toadyism, those longing for the toppling of our corrupt autocrat wannabe are as likely disappointed as are the brave souls who have taken to the streets in Tehran, Hong Kong, Santiago, Bogota and elsewhere.

Until the cognitive dissonance between what the MAGA 40% experience in real life and what they are told is real by the Man in the Red Hat and his propaganda ministry at FOX News becomes too great to tolerate, change is not going to come, democratic ideals won’t be honored, elections won’t be fairly conducted or attacks on them by foreign malefactors deterred, and Trump will not be removed. People with power, money and a big megaphone have more power than people without, and tend to get their way. That’s why the world looks the way it does.

When my generation was over fifty years younger, we heard a voice singing “It’s been a long, long time coming. But I know, but I know a change is gotta come.”

We heard a voice asking “‘How long will justice be crucified, and truth bear it?’ I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because ‘truth, crushed to earth, will rise again’…How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Now, near the end of our days, I am sad to say, cynics and idealists alike, we are still waiting.