Woodstock at 50: A Dream Deferred, or Denied?

Come on, people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now

--"Get Together" by The Youngbloods

One of the oddities I found at my 50-year high school class reunion is that nobody mentioned the class song. Its words are above.

Apparently, we are far beyond that now. It was only a dream.

Fifty years ago, too, came the ultimate musical love-in, be-in, and mud-in in the mid-August heat: Woodstock. It was wonderful, it was awful; it was a chance for terrific music, terrific friendship, terrific trashing of a landscape. It gained praise for young people, it earned condemnation for them. It was something of a dreamscape for some, it was a nightmare for others.

It was a little bit of everything. It probably couldn't have lasted another day, either. Losses in money were catastrophic for the festival organizers; it took years to settle with the groups and individuals who appeared. It took days for cleanup, since so much was left behind, sodden with rain and mud.

And yet, and yet. No fights, no bitter issues among the faithful attendees, despite universal discomfort by nearly every single one of the 400,000. A city the size of Tulsa, and nobody had a strong enough issue with anybody else to come to fisticuffs. Though I don't know of the average age of the festival goers, nobody could assume it might be more than 30. You have to admit: That's amazing.

I wonder: Did anybody have any weapons among them? How did they ever make it through three whole days without them? There isn't a single report that I've read that mentions it.

I was in northwest Massachusetts, visiting friends, the week after. One fellow I ran into said that water he'd had (it was scarce) had been spiked with LSD. It was the same with at least one member of Santana's band, too, said a New York Times reprise article.

Wanting to be stoned, and then being stoned, is one thing. Not knowing it's coming is quite another. It's dangerous. But he survived to tell the story.

The juxtaposition of this idealistic festival with the futile horror of Vietnam is inevitable and telling. This would not be the first time, nor the last, when the nation would be allowed to pursue whatever important and frivolous activities that it felt necessary or suitable while young people were killed thousands of miles away. Whatever guilt or retribution that someone might have connected to it was either ignored or quickly dismissed.

You might have said that indeed, those soldiers were fighting to preserve the freedoms we had and have. If someone wanted to do something that made it look like they weren't especially appreciative, then that, too, was part of the broad canopy of liberty that our society embraces. You might have also said that our freedoms were never the point: It was the freedom of the South Vietnamese that we were fighting for, just like the freedoms of those whom we liberated in two world wars.

Except now we know that our soldiers might not have even needed to be there by that time. Because of recently released documents, we now know that Richard Nixon had bluffed South Vietnam's president, Nguyen Van Thieu, into holding back on negotiations that had been begun by President Lyndon Johnson (by which he sacrificed running for another term) to get us out of the Vietnam War so Nixon could take credit for the eventual peace, regardless of how long that would take.

Because it closed the door on negotiations at least until Nixon became president, and because it took until Nixon's second term for us to guarantee that we would stop fighting, the blood of every single American killed in Vietnam during that time period--including those who died during the time of Woodstock, August 15-17, 1969--is on his hands. In all, that took nearly six more years, an extension of Nixon's corruption beyond his humiliating downfall.

Two and three months later, on October 15 and November 15, 1969, war protesters held massive demonstrations in Washington, DC. They had caught onto the big con, and wanted Nixon to know it. The dream of a world at peace had been denied, firewalled, and turned back.

It also had been betrayed. And here we are, half a century later, still unable to conclude that it all had been worth it. Peace with honor, as Nixon insisted? We got neither. A divided nation remained that way.

Nobody moves on without baggage. Memories are stubborn. Time might heal, but it also might merely scar over, leaving functionality at best.

I wonder what the time of 45's muggery of democracy will leave here. It won't disappear. It won't be pretty, either. How functional are we now? How does that fare on our horizon? Who could possibly have foreseen that at Woodstock?

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark