Whenever I am in DC visiting my sister I have the chance to watch TV. Seeing a special on CNN tonight about Woodstock. It was a music festival, of course, but it was also a political statement, even though they tried, and mostly succeeded in keeping politics off the stage.
The host makes the point that young people who attend music festivals today weren’t even born when we sent troops into war in Afghanistan. The people attending Woodstock might have imagined that they were engaging in a statement against “perpetual war.” Vietnam turned out to be not a perpetual war, and maybe Woodstock should get a little piece of the credit for that. It offered many moments of a vision of the unity that still characterize American society.
Does the failure of the 50th anniversary iteration of Woodstock to materialize mean that the America that spawned the first one is dead? Well, we are changed. That’s for sure. We now live each day with the longest war in American history as an ongoing fact. Music festivals today are entirely commercial in a way that Woodstock might have been, but inevitably wasn’t–given the moment. The young people being sent to Vietnam were conscripted. We have created a way to relegate the dirty work of military action to 1% of our society in this new millennium. We are a different America. We seem to be more selfish–not as selfless.
But that’s not completely fair. The host of the special noted that today’s young people may not have to worry about being sent to die in a far off jungle, but they have to worry about being shot in their schools. Eighteen years into the “war on terror,” our children have more to fear in their own schools than my generation had to fear from foreign battlefields–a supreme irony.
Woodstock was an idealistic expression of the true American ideal. Naive? Certainly. But all the best visions begin seeming to be naive. I don’t think anyone will be able to recreate that moment. But can we use this occasion to remind us of the singular nation that we once were? Can we return to the place where the crew-cut cops (or their 2019 equivalents) deal kindly and gently with the hippies, and where the hippies (and their 2019 equivalents) show support for the crew-cut cops?
This post is not about politics. It’s about somehow bringing our nation back to the place where politics are possible. We can’t go on in the hardened silos that we define as red and blue. Nothing will happen if we try. We have to first agree that we are Americans. Perhaps we don’t all know what that means yet, but we are open to the ongoing evolution that (I hope) our founders envisioned. (This is a special weakness of mine…that the misguided men who wrote our constitution harbored in their hearts a much more expansive vision of human liberty. So do I)
Beating in Air 