I spent a good part of the day recently watching an extremely sad movie.
It wasn’t intended that way when it was first released 53 years ago, but the four-hour director’s cut of “Woodstock” almost made me feel like crying.
Not just for a time gone by, not just for the fact that so many of the wonderful artists who performed there are no longer with us, but for the loss of all that optimism.
If most of the kids who went to Woodstock were between about 18 and 30, that means nearly all of them are past 70 now.
I wasn’t there, but I could have been. I was 19 that summer and I was in New York City a day or two before the festival. I thought about going, but I would have had to do it on my own without getting permission from my parents. They had raised me to be frightened of taking any chances, and as much as I wanted to, I just couldn’t do it.
As the weekend unfolded, as it turned out to be a defining event for a generation, I certainly wished I had. We were living in an era of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and we honestly thought we would change everything.
No more sexism, no more racism, no more greedy corporations dominating our economy.
Oh, a few things have changed. We elected and re-elected an African-American president, although the price we paid was to have him succeeded by a ridiculous criminal in Donald Trump. Sexism and racism haven’t quite gone away yet.
In fact, who would have figured we would have three right-wing presidents — serving five terms — who were even worse than Nixon? And who would have figured the government would be controlled by people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld for eight years?
None of us would have believed that the ’60s would be the high-water mark of egalitarianism, and that the middle class would be as threatened as it is half a century later. How could we have comprehended the “Greed is good” culture of the ’80s and the second Gilded Age that followed?
Listen to the interviews in the movie.
Listen to the music.
So much optimism.
So much hope.
Part of the problem is that the counterculture, as it was called then, was never really a unified movement. Blacks cared more about racism, women about sexism and white men about the war in Vietnam.
We couldn’t keep it together, so it all fell apart.
But watch the movie if you get a chance. For one brief shining moment — three days at least — it was all there to be won. It was a glorious time, and maybe someday it will come again.
Maybe not in my lifetime, but it will come.
I was there. I climbed up on one of the towers. I even have a picture of me on the tower. I sent the pictures I took to my brother in California years ago. He never has sent them back to me. He said he lost them. 😣