The song folded around my soul like an old friend, genuine and true: “But your flag decal won’t get you into Heaven any more. They’re already overcrowded from your dirty little war. Now Jesus don’t like killin’, no matter what the reason’s for, and your flag decal won’t get you into Heaven any more.”

The artist, John Prine, said he wished George Bush would stop doing things that make his old songs popular again. That’s all Prine, one of music’s grittiest songwriters, said about the war with Iraq. That’s all he needed to say.

I looked around Cedar Rapids’ beautifully restored Paramount Theatre on the night of April 19 and saw others nodding in agreement. This isn’t their war, either. Some raised their first two fingers and formed a peace sign. Many of us sang along, recalling the lyrics from the recesses of our minds, where we’d stored them all those years ago.

Just in case we’d ever need them again. Just in case our government used the same old solutions to the same old problems in a world made increasingly dangerous by the exponential growth in our abilities to obliterate one another.

At that moment, it felt like the old days, when I’d sit around with like-minded idealists and talk about whether the nation would ever heal from the wounds brought on by a war that seemed never-ending and by the protests that erupted to stop it.

We were from little towns that don’t even merit a dot on most maps. The Students for a Democratic Society and the Weathermen didn’t show up on the streets of our hometowns to persuade us – some might say terrorize us – into adopting their ideology. Many of us had brothers and peers whose lives had been interrupted by the draft board and who had been shipped off to fight a war that seemed to have no purpose. We figured out for ourselves the line between supporting them and opposing the action that sent them there.

John Prine seemed to be speaking to us. He was a regular guy, born into a blue-collar family. He had been drafted in 1966, and though his tour of duty was in Germany, his signature anthem “Sam Stone,” about a drug-addicted Vietnam vet, made the other songwriters of the time look naive. It hurt – still does – to listen to that song: “Sam Stone came home, to his wife and family, after serving in the conflict overseas. And the time that he served had shattered all his nerves, and left a little shrapnel in his knee. But the morphine eased his pain, and the grass grew round his brain, and gave him all the confidence he lacked, with a Purple Heart and a monkey on his back. There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes. And Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose…”

It’s a little murkier this time around. Among the forty- and fifty-somethings at the Prine concert, there had to be some parents of soldiers in Iraq, some people who believe taking Saddam down was a good and just cause. Not everyone sang along to “Flag Decal.” But no one booed those who did. I left thinking we’d evolved, that we’d learned respect for differences of opinion, that on the eve of Easter, no one was arguing over whether “Jesus don’t like killin’, no matter what the reason’s for.”