On Woodstock

The Woodstock Music and Art Fair of August 1969, whose 40th anniversary was this weekend, has always been an inspiration for me.

This is an opportunity for me to reflect, amidst the slow news cycles of August, on a favorite topic of mine: the March of the Generations. I really like the music from the 60s, it's what I study. When Woodstock happened my own parents were 9 and 10 and 12 timezones away in the Philippines. And I had little concept when I was their age, when preaching about the 1960s, of the Vietnam war and all that. I was a bit of a dork when I was younger, but I do know now that I wanted a world where I could be whatever dork I wanted to be, even if it pained me, and that peace and love's embrace would reach even me.

I just moved back from the rolling hills of Upstate New York and I'm going back this weekend. It was there where a floormate Freshman year, I'll call him Graham Nash, played me the famous 1970 documentary. He found most significant that Joe Cocker's backup singers were male. Over the weekend I finally watched the movie. I know all the music by heart, so it was the faces of the young people that fascinated me the most. Lining up at phone banks calling family, the hustling of cigarettes and the drum circles. I'm happy to learn that being young in America is that specific, even for someone who looks more like the Viet Cong than GI Joe.

It's been written that Woodstock was a moment rather than a movement. That too soon, not that people got old, but that first with Madmen, the Graduate, Woodstock then Fear and Loathing in Las Veas, the world stayed as sketchy as ever. Sketchy as hell, where people succomb to greed, lust and anger but have to hold it in. (Not to say that vice will go way. I'm charmed by its eternity, especially when people are honest about it.)

Hunter Thompson has a beautiful passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It was about how being in San Francisco in the mid-60s was such a specific and special time. The forces of evil in the world were to lose, not out of violent means, but because the momentum was on the side of the fresh, and the young, and the love. It was "riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave..."

"So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

The Baby Boomer generation did okay for themselves. According to a VH1 History Channel special, the couple above in the embrace are old now, grandparents. Harmless, cheerful and near retirement. I guess the same goes for the milenials. Some how I can't imagine snooty sixty year old hipsters in skinny jeans in 2046, but I can imagine a whole generation with a grateful world behind and an incomplete one ahead. We'll all be alright.

What do I mean to say that hasn't already been said? I'm tired now of thinking of a world defined before Marley and Jay-Z, without wikipedia, without ringtones. Back then, my place was set mainly decided by who my Father was. People were drafted into war. In America you can be whoever you want to be, but the market for Freedom is tight even today. Nostalgia aside, it was very difficult back then. I wanna look ahead now. A better question to ask, thus, is what bears saying even if a million times forgotten and a million and one times said?

That Love is the Answer. Let's Love ourselves and each other and build our new Century ahead.

Musical Selection: Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together and love one another right now.