Defending Woodstock: We Were Naïve, But it Was Fun
By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
I'd like to respond to a commenter responding to a USNews.com article on Woodstock's 40th anniversary. The commenter asked:
Why do we have to relive the 1960s every decade ["10 Places to Relive the '60s," usnews.com]? Baby boomers feel that the sun rose (and is now setting) on their generation. Other generations are not trying to "re-create" the 1960s. This article is another example of the over-inflated boomer ego. Music festivals are festivals. Woodstock was a huge example but not the first and obviously not the last. I would not be proud of a generation whose massive flower power numbers failed to bring peace, only years of war and huge debt.
I was at Woodstock—I promise. And I never cared much for the decennial media reminders of the festival—that is, until this one. I don't agree that over-inflated boomer ego is responsible for what seems to have become an obsessive observation of its anniversary. I do now believe that it was an iconic event for young Americans who came of age in the '60s and '70s, much as the Vietnam War, the anti-war protests and Earth Day for that matter.
I also believe we (I was 15 at Woodstock) were incredibly naïve and misguided in many of our judgments about human nature, peace, war, drugs, poverty and so on. But it sure was fun being a part of what seemed to be an evolutionary if not revolutionary event.
I don't agree with this quote from John Lennon either about the meaning of the '60s, but it sums up what everyone was thinking at the time:
The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn't the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.
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Reader Comments
Better defense of the 60's Baby Boomers hoped for
If this is supposed to be a defense of the Baby Boomers and The 60's Woodstock Culture, it is unbearably weak. I agree with John Lennon's comments and look forward to the arrival of an intellectually and morally rigorous body of work defending the ideas and values of the 60's counterculture.
There may have been some things that the Baby Boomer generation was wrong about but there were definitely things they were right about. No generation after them has produced music as colorful (ie., voices and chords as crisp and colorful as The Beatles and everything that came with them (some of which include some of tha musicians well into the seventies) such as ELP, Yes, CSN&Y, Cream, The Grateful Dead, etc.). Social awareness, Meditation and Yoga, Environmentalism, all came with this generation.
If we leave everything up to these people who put down the Baby Boomers then the Earth is in trouble. Either that OR we'll all go back to the "Ozzie and Harriet days" when the Earth was believed to be flat and a healthy diet was considered to be a stack of pancakes with towers of butter and greasy bacon on th side.
Woodstock Generation
We all thought we were going to change the world, but it turned out the world didn't want to be changed. Indeed, it slowly squeezed us into is mold, and ended up changing us!
Perhaps people who didn't live through the 50s don't get it
An example: When I was in elementary school in the 50s, bullies on the playground were at least tolerated, if not encouraged. They helped keep the playground under control and enforced the social order. The 60s, Woodstock and all, were needed to shake up the status quo, which was unbearably authoritarian.
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