As for why the song still resonates with liberal activists (and their progeny) after all these years, Professor Ira Chernus, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, explained a decade ago (reprinted in 2013):

It isn’t just to recapture our lost youth (though perhaps there is nothing wrong with that). It’s also because we were young at a very special time, when it seemed that the whole world would soon shed its aging body, worn down by war and greed and dehumanization, and regain its lost youth.

Never again, we believed, would anyone be arrested for littering. Never again would anyone be fined fifty dollars and have to pick up the garbage. Never again would anyone be injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected by their government to join the army, burn women, kids, houses, and villages.

Soon, we believed, the whole world would be full of loving people who would take out the garbage whenever it needed to be taken out, bring it down to the city dump, then go back home to have a dinner that couldn’t be beat. And not just on Thanksgiving, because we believed that every day would be Thanksgiving. Every day we would feel awestruck and thankful for the little miracles of life, like sharing food and song with people we love. Every day, we would do just a bit more to right the world’s wrongs, to make sure that justice was really blind. And all the while, we would remember to laugh and play with the pencils there on the Group W bench.

Well, it hasn’t worked out quite that way, yet. The world keeps doing all kinds of mean, nasty, ugly things. But kid, it’s never too late to “rehabilitate” yourself, to start once again creating enough of a nuisance and singing loud enough to end war and stuff. If you’ve been doing it for 40 years, or more, I bet you are prepared to do it for another 40 years. I bet you still have high hopes that we can “REHABILITATE” the world. I bet you’re not proud -- or tired.

The golden age of the 1960s is long gone, but anything is still possible. So perhaps you can get anything you want, as long as you remember to sing it the next time it comes around on the guitar -- with feeling. Because it is, indeed, a movement: The Alice’s Restaurant Let’s Give Thanks and Remember Why We Started Doing This and Why We Keep On Keepin’ On Movement.

I had a wonderful Thanksgiving Eve dinner at the parents of the TL kid's long-time girlfriend (edited to reflect that they aren't actual soon to be inlaws yet, and I wasn't making an announcement about them, but about successfully avoiding the topic of the election) -- 10 of us and 5 dogs -- and not one person uttered one word about politics, the name of the UnPresident Elect, the election or anything related. (The hosting parents are a lovely couple, but very conservative. Their children were initial Sanders or Hillary supporters and ultimate Hillary supporters.) So it can be done, and it's actually a great experience because we all ended up sharing much more about what's going on in our lives instead of talking about those peoples' lives.

This is an open thread, tell us about your day, and anything else you want to talk about.

And don't forget to give a listen to Arlo.