The Death of Woodstock

Yes, I am nominally a member of the "Woodstock" generation. My junior high school (now called middle school) and high school years were filled with the music of the Beatles and others of the British menagerie (The Animals, The Turtles, The Rolling Stones). My politics were informed by Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, the Vietnam War, Watergate, folk music, and "make love, not war." We were the ones who dreamed we saw "the bomber jet planes flying shotgun in the sky, turning into butterflies above our nation." We would lead humanity "back to the Garden".

Of course, the "purple haze" of our semi-conscious, delirious existence was given a dose of reality by the culmination of campus "demonstrations" in the shooting at Kent State (or as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young would sing, "four dead in O-hi-o") and the violence led by Abbie Hoffman outside the Democratic convention in Chicago. And our "icons" of the faith, like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, were dying from their "if it feels good, do it" ethic, ushered barefoot along their own Abbey Road through the ravages of too much "sex, drugs, and rock and roll" (or, at least, too much "drugs"). Maybe the "high priest" of our movement, Dr. Timothy Leary, had never really taken into consideration the ultimate results of the "tune in, turn on, drop out" philosphy, which resulted in the rapid increase of sexually trasmitted diseases among young people, an increase in teen pregnancies and abortions, an increase of drug usage, addiction, and death by drug overdose...all from a generation for whom "make love, not war" became and an excuse for hedonists and "street" capitalists with no conscience to prey on the naivite of the young.

Yes, our generation brought you "it takes a village to raise a child"...because no one knew the child's father, the child's mother was strung out on drugs, or young, helpless, and runaway from any family support, and the child was, at best, an afterthought. Yes, we brought you the children raised in homes where they watched their "parents" puff up, snort up, or shoot up their meager incomes, experiencing the hopelessness of barely present adults, learning the rough survival skills of the street...lying, cheating, stealing...prostitution, dealing drugs...preying on each other in a village of "survival of the fittest." The lucky ones went to prison, where for the price of being raped, they could at least get "three hots and a cot". The unlucky ones...well...

Of course, there were many us who lived through these times of psychedelic dreams to become members of a disaffected middle class, retreating into the ivory towers of academia where we could share memories of Led Zepplin, the Grateful Dead, Cream...and visions of our lost Woodstock utopia with others whose selective memories allowed them to ignore the truly dark underside of our generation's legacy. Others with families more "well off" could retreat into small towns, create havens of like-minded cultural aesthetes, and pass on our poison to future generations. Because poison it was. Our generation was not too idealistic. It just wanted the ideals without the steep price that former generations had to pay for them. We wanted the freedom of love without committment, of sex without responsibility, of peace at any price, of truth without Truth.

But now, generations to come...made up of our own children and grandchildren...begin to come of age. And we are shocked. Shocked! We are shocked at the rising teen suicide rate, senseless violence in schools and neighborhoods accompanied by the stacatto rhythms of gangsta' rap, the obsession of many with the philosophically "undead" that is "goth". Our mouseketeers become sex kittens, our sense of sexuality becomes "uni" or "metro"...and the cycle perpetuates itself. "Whatever feels good...". So we shake our heads, click our tongues, and go back to our philosophical opium dens to take another toke of the Woodstock dream...and drift away into our own strawberry fields, where living is easy with eyes closed...not seeing, not wishing to acknowledge, our complicity in the creation of the monster of our own undoing. But unless we arouse from our stupor to the Truth, who calls us to turn away from our dead existence to Life, will we even recognize our own destruction? For even dreams of "strawberry fields" do not last forever...