Where have all the flower children gotten us?
This year marks the 40th anniversary of a simple music concert that's become synonymous with the tumultuous changes of the 1960s—Woodstock.
Canadians and Americans count Woodstock as a touchstone in time—an event that both defined an era and signaled the end of a new "Age of Aquarius." Woodstock was a music and art festival billed as "An Aquarian Exposition" and held at a farm in Bethel, New York, 69 kilometres from the Village of Woodstock, from August 15 to 18, 1969. The festival has gone down as the counterculture event of the so-called "hippie era."
I was four years old at the time and living in another country, so Woodstock has never had much of a hold on me. But I find it amazing that for people who remember Woodstock, the event has become a '60s Rosetta Stone. For me, Woodstock is simply about great music—Santana; Canned Heat; Janice Joplin; Creedence Clearwater Revival; The Who; The Band; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and Jimi Hendrix.
I often find myself being harangued by the parents of children my kids now go to school with—people who are 10 to 15 years older than me—about how I just don't get what an incredible "revolution" Woodstock was celebrating. It also seems that a real social divide has emerged between the children of the '60s and those of us that grew up in the hedonistic '70s and capitalist '80s.
Those readers who want to understand Woodstock and the counterculture's impact on our society might start by watching Ang Lee's '70s drama The Ice Storm before taking in Lee's new film, Taking Woodstock, which will be heavily promoted this summer.
While Lee's new ode to Woodstock will play well with ageing hippies, The Ice Storm touches on the disillusionment that followed the Woodstock era. Suburban families unraveling amid adultery and casual drug use, the bitter disappointment of the Watergate Scandal, the radicalization of the counterculture and Black Power movements and the Manson murders are just some of the fruits of the '60s.
Here in Canada we had our own little counterculture. Pierre Trudeau was a new type of politician, a "cool cat" who made women swoon and men admire his debonair personality. In places like Toronto's Yorkville Village, sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll were the new "normal." Those who cut their teeth in the '60s grew to become some of the leaders who eventually helped usher in a new Constitution, a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, even Free Trade.
What we have to ask ourselves in considering Woodstock and its legacy is whether that legacy has kept faith with the peace and love mantra it espoused.
This is where those hippie parents and I have our bitterest disagreements. The myth of the '60s is that "peace and love" was hijacked and never allowed to flourish. The argument goes that if everyone "tuned in and turned on" (maybe even "dropped out"), crime, hate, war and all those nasty things the '60s generation riled against would have gone away.
If we look at the '70s, when the hippies were moving into their mid-to-late 20s and 30s, we see that the legacies of freer attitudes toward sex and drugs in particular were morphing into their natural outcomes.
"Free sex" inevitably resulted in skyrocketing sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies and bitter people who found that lots of sex with different partners does not equal sexual fulfillment.
Casual drug use did not lead to greater perception or enlightenment. It did lead marijuana smokers to harder drugs such as LSD and heroin, not to mention the hard drugs of today (crystal meth and ecstasy) that fuel organized crime.
This is not to lay all the blame for our 21st century woes at the feet of the Woodstock generation. But before we idealize Woodstock, let's understand that many of its ideals turned into a type of selfishness. Free love meant satisfying one's own physical needs. Casual drugs were all about one's own highs, not peace and love. Even the '60s ideals that drove the anti-war and civil rights movements eventually gave rise to the tyranny of "political correctness" and "rights and freedoms" that are all about personal rights and everyone else be damned.
Far out, man.
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