50 years later, realizing the true meaning of Woodstock
Yikes, Woodstock was just getting started 50 years ago yesterday! Lordy, I’m old. Most of the present population of the world was not born when Woodstock happened.
Everyone who wasn’t there or wasn’t born when Woodstock went down seems to be spending this week, or this month, pondering the greater meaning of it all.
Here’s what it meant: We were a bunch of white bread, Middle Class Baby Boomers – hippies, yippies, high school and college students and working-class
20-somethings – who got to spend three days skinnydipping, smoking exceedingly weak weed and listening to some great music.
And despite the rain and food shortages and overflowing porta-potties, we had a great time.
We also got to quit worrying for a couple of days about whether we or our brothers or boyfriends or husbands would be swept up in the next round of the “Selective Service” draft and packed off to some country halfway around the world to die as cannon fodder in someone else’s civil war. That’s pretty much all it meant. We didn’t know Woodstock would become such an iconic cultural watershed, that there were
400,000 or so of us there or that we would spend such a peaceful, joyful three days in a cow pasture in upstate New York.
What is most important about Woodstock is the context of the times in which it took place.
A college friend of mine said to me just last week, “The thing about being old is we’ve already seen everything that’s happening now three or four times before.”
There’s a kernel of truth in that.
We haven’t seen exactly what’s happening now, but we’ve seen vicious racism, hatred, violence, fear, senseless war and venal presidents a time or two and we can recognize the signs when it’s all coming around again.
History didn’t start with us, despite what we might have thought when we were 20. We weren’t taught and didn’t know much then about the far worse world upheaval our parents had been through in the 1930s and
1940s and the forgotten Korean War of the early 1950s.
But by the time Woodstock took place, our own generation had lived through a couple of years of hell.
In January 1968, North Korea created a major international incident by seizing the USS Pueblo, raising fears that the U.S. was going back to Korea. One American crew member died and the remaining 82 were held in terrible conditions until that December.
A few weeks later, starting on Jan. 30, 1968, the North Vietnamese launched the bloody Tet offensive in which 3,470 American troops were killed and 12,000 wounded, causing a rapid escalation of our involvement in Vietnam.
Some weeks in 1968 and 1969
300 body bags a week were coming home from ‘Nam. It was the first war to play out every night on TV.
We saw the assassination of Martin Luther King in April and Robert Kennedy in June of 1968. Kennedy was our last great hope for ending the war and restoring racial peace at home.
King’s assassination led to horrific race riots in Baltimore, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Detroit, Louisville, New York City and 122 other cities of these United States in which hundreds died.
While our cities were burning, disproportionate numbers of black men were being sent to ‘Nam, unable to get out of it with a note from their doctors. The boxer Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) became a hero for refusing to become one of them. IT cost him his heavyweight crown.
At the 1968 summer Olympics, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in a defiant black power salute after winning the gold and bronze medals in the Olympic men’s 200 meters. White Americans were terrified that the heavily armed Black Panthers were preparing to lead an urban uprising.
In September 1968, 150 to 200 women staged one of the first women’s liberation demonstrations on the Atlantic City boardwalk to protest the Miss America Pageant. (They didn’t burn bras, but I wish they had.)
We saw the ‘68 Democratic convention at which the Chicago police boxed in and attacked thousands of anti-war activists in Grant Park. That November, we saw the election of a deeply corrupt president, Richard Nixon.
Nixon had “a secret plan” to end the war that never materialized. We found out later that his advisers secretly sabotaged the peace negotiations to enhance his election chances, getting thousands more of our boys killed for no reason.
The Santa Barbara oil spill dumped 80,000 to 100,000 barrels of crude oil onto the pristine beaches of Southern California in January of 1969 in what was then the world’s biggest oil spill, and the Cuyahoga River caught fire that June, forcing Nixon and Congress to establish the EPA the following year.
Some good news occurred as well. The nation united and watched on July 20, as Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
But just a week before Woodstock, members of the Manson Family – a sick perversion of what we thought of as hippies – invaded the home of actor Sharon Tate and killed her, her 8-monthold fetus and four other people in a gruesome, senseless murder that was meant to incite a race war.
America had been a thick, bubbling stew of anger and hopelessness for years. Our generation channeled its angst into marching, listening to Dylan and the Beatles, making tie-dyed Tshirts and painting our VWs DayGlo colors, not picking up AR-15s and shooting crowds of innocent Americans.
That was the milieu in which Woodstock happened and that’s how it needs to be understood, if it needs to be understood at all. Jodine Mayberry is a retired editor, longtime journalist and Delaware County resident. Her column appears every Friday. You can reach her at jodinemayberry@comcast.net.