Woodstock still resonates 50 years later

Teenagers were invented in the late 1950s. If that is an exaggeration, it is not as much of one as you may think. While there had – obviously – been teenagers before, it was not until the leading edge of the baby boom reached that milestone that the word took on its modern meaning.

In the heady prosperity of those first years post-war and postDepression, ‘‘teenage’’ came to be seen as a wholly separate phase of life, a way station between childhood and adulthood.

Where once it had been common for people that age to help support the family or to marry and make families of their own, these new teenagers were more likely to be spared such adult responsibilities.

They – the white ones growing up in the new suburbs, at least –

were flush with cash, brimming with modern conceits and, initially, indulged by parents captivated by the very newness of them.

Their fashion, politics, music, movies and mores would blow away the old like cobwebs in a wind tunnel.

It is no coincidence that civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, environmental activism and scepticism toward authority all came of age at the same time they did. Unlike any generation before or since, they would be defined by the fact of being new, of being young.

Until they weren’t. This week, after all, marks the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, the rain-soaked, mudsplattered three-day rock concert on a farm in upstate New York that many mark as the climactic act of the baby boom years.

Which raises a question: When you have so long been defined by youth, what do you become when youth is gone?

Maybe you have seen that commercial where a millennial is eager to improve her credit rating so she can move away from the clueless nit that is her mum.

Maybe you remember when people like you were the ones on TV snickering at old folks’ old folksiness. Now, you are the one being snickered at and people like you are hawking walk-in tubs and adult diapers.

But if it is true that the shine has worn off Generation Boom, that bell-bottoms and ‘‘groovy’’ have gone the way of rumble seats and ‘‘23 skidoo’’, it is also true that much of what that generation championed seems not just timely but critical.

The new rise in racist rhetoric and violence certainly vindicates the boomers’ fight for civil rights.

The Me Too movement extends their fight for women’s rights.

If LGBTQ people now have the right to be married, the United States Supreme Court said last year they have no right to a wedding cake, so that battle continues.

As the planet burns, environmental activism has never been more important. And when authority’s name is Trump, who can deny it needs to be questioned?

Jimi Hendrix famously closed Woodstock by fracturing the national anthem, his guitar splintering the song into jagged, defiantly ugly shards, reflecting the jagged, ugly shards of America’s division. And that, too, remains relevant 50 years on.

But for all the hard truths Hendrix told through his guitar, it is worth remembering that what drew the Woodstock generation together was ultimately not anger but a hope – idealistic, naive and impossibly young – that yet tugs at the imagination, the hope of a better, fairer, cleaner, saner, more peaceful world.

As Woodstock veteran Graham Nash recently told CBS News: ‘‘I still believe what we believed then . . . that love is better than hatred, that peace is much better than war, that we have to take care of our fellow human beings, because this is all we have.’’

Somewhere along the way, Nash, like many of us, got old. But that hope never did.

Leonard Pitts Jr is a columnist for the Miami Herald.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why the general public should care about prisoners’ voting rights. But apparently it should, despite myriad glaring shortcomings in the prison system.

The kerfuffle reflects a trend where a minor issue distracts from more important problems much more deserving of attention.

Those relatively trivial issues then become like a scout badge for the bleeding heart left, another box to tick to prove their empathy with the oppressed.

These issues are a gift for the National opposition and a trap for Labour. Most of the public want prisoners to be treated humanely but are not going to get exercised by about 6500 offenders, who consist mainly (about 80 per cent) of violent criminals, sex and drug offenders and burglars, not getting a say in the Government.

It is not as if their voting rights are confiscated for good. As soon as they get out they can re-enrol. On release, most inmates, I suspect, have more pressing concerns than voting in the next election.

Judges actually work hard to keep people out of prison so none of the offences earning imprisonment are trivial or generally one-offs.

Some have asked what purpose the disfranchisement serves. Pretty obvious, I would have thought.

A prison sentence is essentially treating adults like naughty and sometimes dangerous toddlers.

We design a big, bleak playpen and put them in there as a punishment to instil better habits. Some of the adult toddlers are so dangerous they have to be kept in the playpen to avoid the risk they will harm the rest of society.

Given the childlike state in which inmates live, their inability to vote is just a minor part of a raft of adult rights and privileges that are withdrawn in jail.

But voting rights, we are told, are of fundamental importance.

In 2010, the National-led government amended the Electoral Act so no prisoner could register on the electoral roll and vote in a national election. Previously, only prisoners serving a sentence of three years’ imprisonment or more were prohibited from voting.

Last year the Supreme Court endorsed a High Court decision ruling the disenfranchisement breached the Bill of Rights Act.

The Waitangi Tribunal last week released its He aha i pe¯ra¯ ai?