Ok.  I admit it.  I am a part of the Woodstock generation.  I didn’t go to Woodstock.  On the day of the concert my active-duty Navy husband and I were on our way to Long Island to visit his parents.  We had no idea that there was such a thing as Woodstock.  We thought the traffic jam in Westchester County looked a little unusual for a Westchester County traffic jam, but somehow we managed to deal with it.

The American Thinker ran a piece on Woodstock yesterday.  Was it all important or was it nothing?  I guess it represented one part of the culture of that time and represented the drastic changes that were taking place in the culture at that time.  Think back to the things that changed as the 1960’s ended.

Many of the baby boomers chose unhealthy lifestyles as a way to deal with the pressures around them.  Admittedly, growing up as an early boomer had its challenges–we practiced hiding under our desks in elementary school to protect ourselves from nuclear attack, and we were told to be afraid when Russia launched the first space satelite.  In our teenage years and young twenties, we saw a President assassinated (over and over again on television), we saw a man ‘who had a dream’ killed in Memphis, and a young Senator killed in California.  Regardless of your politics, all three of these men represented hope to a new generation coming of age.  We saw riots in some of our major cities and it seemed as if our country was falling apart and our government wasn’t listening (kind of like today).  

For some of the boomers, the answer was pure rebellion against authority.  To me, that is what Woodstock was about.  This was no deep intellectual event–it was a bunch of teenagers and young adults having a last fling before taking on the responsibility of being adults.  As in every generation before and since, some of them grew up to take responsibility as adults and accomplish great things, and some didn’t! 

Boomers had their challenges, but so did the generation that went through the depression and fought World War II, the difference is that the boomers have never really gotten over themselves.