Hippie-Movement

psychonauts:

Woodstock. Today is the 40th anniversary of the most popular, and arguably most inspiring music festival in the history of mankind.

Born fifteen years after this event took place; I can’t pretend to have experienced anything even close to comparable to the famous ‘Summer of Love’ fest.

The question I am left with is ‘why then? why not now?’ In 1999 at the 30th anniversary Woodstock concert, musicians actually invoked a (seemingly meaningless) riot when Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit crowd surfed on a piece of fence that had been torn down. Is this a sign of the times? Has popular rock music become something more ignorant and blatantly violent than it was in the 1960’s? Yes, without a doubt and I believe it speaks very lowly of the youth of our nation. I think though, in the ten years since the Woodstock riot of ‘99 we’ve been heading back in the right direction; partially due to the growing popularity of the internet but mostly due to the realities of struggling through an endless unjustified war in the Middle East waking people up to the sickness and corruption of our society.

The hippy’s ‘Love Revolution,’ was their answer to the world’s ‘Industrial Revolution.’ They saw the world as a cold dark impersonal place and knew it didn’t have to be this way:

“there was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning… .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave… .

But 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.” Hunter S. Thompson

The wave apparently made it all the way from the West Coast of California to the East Coast state of New York; a tsunami of love and peace if you will. Many twenty-somethings have grown up with a totally different mindset than they would have if this revolution did not occur. Our parents; the baby boomers, many ex-hippies (or current hippies in rare cases) themselves have brought us up with a different idea of how things ought to be. People should be free; freedom of expression, free to experiment with chemicals, free to make love, free to claim their civil rights, free to promote peace and speak out against tyranny. The true American Revolution was not a war we fought with the British, it is when we took our freedom back. When the common people of this nation stood up in the face of incredible odds against the corrupt Military-Industrial complex; when we wouldn’t stand for their senseless killing and fought to hold our own leaders accountable for their war crimes.

I’m sure many business men and politicians of the time looked at these young people and became afraid of regression; people living naked in nature, rolling around in mud and bathing in natural bodies of water, but they missed the point. Regression is not what should have made them scared, it was the progress of freedom which would have really bothered them. It’s sad to see the hippy culture dying off, and a new more violent, ignorant era coming on. I hope for the sake of humanity that this ignorance is short-lived.

Forty years, it seems like a lifetime; it actually is a lifetime for some. I’ve always said I would give anything to have been at Woodstock; to be a part of that revolution, dropping acid while listening to Hendrix shred the National Anthem, running around naked without a care in the world, knowing that the thousands of people with me want nothing but peace, love and music.