Woodstock-Boomer Generation

Woodstock-Boomer Generation

Audio version

https://1drv.ms/u/s!ApcspsqQAspIiRA7w9X4JAT3wGq
 Taking a re-evaluation of what it is to be a part of this 
generation, which in the 60’s was known for 
Haight-Ashbury, 
1967 Monterey Pop-Festival,

the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention 
scene, and

Woodstock, now we are more 
identified with jaded and corrupt 
politicians,

a few outstanding 
public servants, and 
MAGA-supporters.

Just taking the 400-500,00 

who were at Woodstock, ya think that it would be 
representative and not an anomaly of our generation. 

Having known a few and their attitudes, being 

at Woodstock was as much a self-indulgence of ‘Me-ism’, 

as it was about being a part of a happening.

One could easily say that being part of

the Tea Party or MAGA 

movements of the Right or the Anti-Fa or 
#MeToo movements of 
the Left are as much about the same kind of  
self-righteous indulgence, as being part of the scenes 
of the ‘60’s were. Though the Antifa or #MeToo
movements demographics may be 20 or so years younger, 
than those of the Tea Party or MAGA movements, one 

could draw a rhetorical, if not genealogical, 

connection to the protest and cultural movements 

of the 60’s.

The idealism, granted with much naivete, I held 

for the cultural aspects of Woodstock and the 
Chicago Convention protests is more tempered now in 

my thinking that it exists in a few high-profile 

individuals and,
possibly, more anonymous, locally isolated congregants

 , than the ubiquitous mind-set I 

thought would be an inevitable consequence.

I should’ve known better from the obvious 

manifestations I dismissed as Ivy League 

characteristics of regressive revisionism of what 

I held as the ideals. But, from what I observed 

as the motivation and barely concealed intentions 
of the undergrads who matriculated to my college 
after me; the returning Vietnam ‘short-timers’ at 
my first military bases in the 1972-75 period; 
the general, civilian, pedestrian mode of behavior 
were at best no better 
than the lip-service I’d see and hear from 
‘Sunday-church service Christians’ 
-spectacle and catharsis indulgents. And wouldn’t 
that be the more expected result, since the former 
were just cultural extensions of the latter ‘being 
at a church-service on Sunday’ crowd? At best, 
there was always a superficial posturing, but for a 
substantive ends that had nothing to do with my 
take-away interpretation of how I idealistically 
(and impractically) viewed and experienced the 
late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s.

I’m  confessing to myself that ‘the Clintons’, 
George ‘W’  & Jeb Bush, and the 
sexagenarians and septuagenarians of 
45-50 years later ARE the latter-day reflection of 
the self-centered and self-serving opportunists we 
were in the same way in our secular, self-righteousness, 
when not near the levers of power in the 
1950’s-60’s-and-70’s. 

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