Woodstock and America, Then and Now


Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Most people have at some time heard these lyrics, from the Crosby, Stills, Nash &Young song “Woodstock”:

“By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong,
And everywhere there was song and celebration.”

The year was 1969, of course. It was one of the highs – Americans walked on the moon – and lows – the war in Vietnam was dividing the country.

The three-day concert, which has become an iconic event in the history of the 1960s, was held at Max Yasgur’s 240-hectare dairy farm near the little town of White Lake, New York, in the Catskill Mountains, from August 15 to August 18.

I was in the Catskills earlier this month, in the town of Woodstock. It has long been a gathering place for artists, musicians, and writers, even before the music festival – which was actually held some 65 kilometres away -- made the name famous. (It was originally to be held in Woodstock itself but the venue there proved too small.)

Yet how different America seems four decades later. The hippies and flower children -- now in their sixties! -- have given way to “millennials,” younger people who wonder if they’ll ever have a decent career. The euphoria of the 1960s is now a memory, replaced by economic crisis and paranoia about terrorism.

There’s no need to reiterate the depressing data regarding debt, deficits, and dismal unemployment numbers. Things remain dire and there seems little government nor business can do about it.

Concerns over security have made it almost impossible to walk into many buildings or board airplanes without waiting in lines to be searched. Gone are the days when it was as easy to get onto a plane as to hop on a bus.

In New York City, I spoke to friends and relatives – doctors, professors, real estate agents, journalists -- about America’s woes. All were pessimistic. They were all liberal Democrats, as well, and feared Barack Obama might lose next year’s presidential election to a Republican.

“Woodstock,” it turns out, was in retrospect not “the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” but a fleeting moment in American history.

Things are not looking good in America. But as my mother once said, at least “New York is New York.”