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PROCEED TO COMMENTARY WOODSTOCK INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT Following is an interview and subsequent commentary of a teenage couple taken from the Woodstock film published in 1970 of the 1969 3-day concert. 400,000+ people were in attendance. http://www.amazon.com/Woodstock-Days-Peace-Music-Directors/dp/0790729350 Interviewer – Are you going together? Him – We lived together for about 4 or 5 months with a lot of other people, what you would call a communal thing, but we just live together, so we just decided to come down together because we were both coming here. Her – There is no definite thing that we are going to be together throughout the whole thing. Interviewer – So, you’re not particularly jealous? Her – (laugh) No Interviewer – Are you two going together? Him – No Interviewer – But you come up here together… Him – Yeah, I like her; I love her; I enjoy her. Interviewer – What do you think about all that? Her – the way I look at it, um, I’ve been going with Gary for about 4 or 5 or 6 months now, when he moved into the family group that I was at that I already knew for quite a while. And at that time I got to know him real well, and I learned to love him, and um, you know, we ball and everything, but like it’s really a pretty good thing because there’s plenty of freedom, because we are not like going together, and we’re not in love or anything like that, you know. Interviewer – Do you communicate with your parents? Her – I can communicate with them on one level, and that, now that I have been away from home for two years, at first it was very rough, and now they are beginning to mellow about it. And you know, it’s not so hard on them the way I am, but I can’t really communicate to them about anything that is really important because they just could not understand it. Because my mother really lives in a lot of pain because she is sure I am going to go to hell and there is nothing I can do to tell her that, you know, that that just doesn’t exist for me, you know, so there is no communications on those levels. Him – My father was asking me whether I was in a communist training camp or something in the house that I was in, and I can understand where he is coming from, because he is an immigrant, you know, so he came over here to better himself economically and socially and all that other rot, and make it better for me, and he can’t understand why I didn’t play, you know. It’s like why aren’t you playing the game, you know. Um, here’s all this opportunity, and here are all these things that should have all this value, but they only have value to him, and he can’t understand why they don’t have value to me. But then again he does have wisdom enough to, you know, to allow me to be who I am. He has some kind of idea in his head that I will by doing what I’m doing learn for myself how to live, and that’s what he wants me to do anyway. So, you know, he can’t understand why I am the way I am, but he pretty much wants me to be that way, because, you know, that’s the only thing for me. Her – He started this trip when he was four years old (laugh). Interviewer – Nothing to do with drugs or … Him – No Her – Me neither Interviewer – Is that a copout or … Him – I don’t know, I used to be into drugs, and uh, I almost uh, I was really heavy on drugs, but now it seems it’s almost contrived. It’s like drugs and revolution and like, the United Front and, you know… I’m a human being; that’s all I want to be and, you know, I don’t want to have a mass change because mass change only brings mass insanity, you know. That’s like people who are nowhere are coming here because they think there are people who are somewhere, so everybody is really looking for, you know, some kind of answer, where there isn’t one. You know, because I think, why would 300,000… 120,000… 60,000… 70,000 people come to anything, you know, um like, just because it’s music. I mean, was music all that important? I don’t really think so, but people don’t know, I mean, they don’t know how to live, and they don’t know what to do, and they think that if they can come here, they can find out, you know, what it is or how to maintain with it or… its just, people are very lost. COMMENTS: Woodstock was a pivotal moment in society. The sixties was a time in American history that will be remembered as one of the greatest times to be alive as a young adult. However, the spirit of the time is gone and impossible to recover; even less attainable is the spirit of the sixties that inspired those events. For example, people tried to recreate Woodstock in the musical concerts that followed and were drenched in violence. Woodstock’s success as a peaceful gathering of close to a half million young people tempted many to believe they had something to share with the world, yet the hippies left the festival with a lot of good memories, but little else. Many people viewed Woodstock as a social experiment that actually succeeded, yet people were unable to agree on what it actually succeeded to do, other than to remain peaceful, while others say that peace was the goal they achieved. Many young people went there looking for something more than just sex, drugs and rock-n-roll; they felt they were somehow tapping into some higher consciousness that no one before them had attained, but after Woodstock this view soon faded. However, they were right about a few things: they condemned materialism recognizing it as intrinsically evil and they saw the Vietnam War as immoral and unethical; but they were wrong about a few things too: they had no plan for peace or how to perpetuate their movement without money, since many of them were still receiving financial support from their parents. Also, there is fundamentally no such thing as free sex, for it largely produced an illegitimate generation, many of whom never had what their parents had… parents. It would be fair to hold up this girl and boy in the interview as a microcosm of everyone in attendance, and the concert as an icon of the hippy movement, for the concert itself was a statement of many things this couple verbalized, well framing the mindset of the time. The girl said that communication lines were severed between her and her mother based on some of the decisions she had made with her lifestyle, saying that her mother thought she was going to hell for living without sexual restraint, commenting, ‘My mother’s beliefs about the Bible “just don’t exist for me.”’ Nevertheless, a half-hearted Christian revival did emerge as one of a handful of radical ideals that spawned from the freethinking people, who also consented with free sex ideologies, which literally defined the hippy movement. This girl drew a definitive line between the hippy version of Christianity and the misnomer of free sex, rightly separating the lifestyle of the hippy movement from the teachings of the Bible. The sixties were a great time to be alive as an adolescent and young adult; they had a lot of good intentions but they contradicted themselves on too many levels for the general public to take them seriously. The reason this happened was they were following their carnally motivated, fleshly impulses to determine right from wrong, and the flesh is incapable of understanding God’s plan for mankind, and man has no truth apart from God. My favorite part of the interview was the guy’s very last words, “Its just, people are very lost.” In the movie this interview was recorded on a hill overlooking the festival, and the boy’s attitude mirrored the standpoint of overlooking the people as though he were above them on an ideological plateau, and in fact probably did know more about the people than the rest of us, because he was there, immersed in their lifestyle, being one of them. That is the reason this interview is important, and it also exposes his irony of thinking he had some kind of advantage over everyone else at the concert when there was really nothing about him that set him apart, except in his own mind. I especially enjoyed his candor when he said, "That’s like people who are nowhere are coming here because they think there are people who are somewhere, so everybody is really looking for, you know, some kind of answer, where there isn’t one." According to him, there are no answers, proposing that Woodstock was the proverbial illustration of the blind following the blind. This is a very insightful statement regarding the route that society took to arrive at our present social state. In his mind there are no answers, which inadvertently or otherwise renounces the cross of Jesus Christ, which was God’s answer to the human condition. His statement drew an arrow from the hippy movement to the days in which we are now living, for over a course of fifty years society as a whole has rejected what the hippies have proposed, and adopted this boy's point of view, proposing that no answers exist to humanity’s problems, thus rejecting Christ as their solution, (maybe not as their religion) and has allowed the demonic belief systems of atheism and agnosticism to guide them into the darkening haze of unbelief. This is the progeny of those who won the war; imagine what might have happened had their fathers lost the war, would their children have become more lost? Just twenty-five years earlier most of the developed nations of the world were involved in World War II, allowing us to imagine millions of people cheering the war’s end and then settling down, getting married and producing the hippies of the 60’s. That sounds unintended, so how did it happen? All the developing nations infrastructures were destroyed in the war, except America’s, so we became the suppliers of the world’s goods after World War II for about twenty highly prosperous years, not by coincidence the same period of the hippy generation. America’s economy boomed in the fifties and sixties, which built up our nation as the superpower that it is today. Under these ideal conditions parents who lived through the hell of war raised their children in the sixties, who summarily rebelled against their parents hard-bought ideas, creating not a hard working class like their own but a lot of lazy pleasure seekers, using protest against materialism and the Vietnam War as their excuse to defect from the expectations of their parents and society. They abandoned everything their parents fought and worked so hard to achieve, and in one generation, like the prodigal son, traded it all to exploit their own bodies in search of utopia. The sixty’s hippy movement broadcasted a fatal message to society, fizzling in the 70’s, that there is no utopia (at least they didn’t find it). As a result, subsequent generations haven’t even bothered to look, which is equivalent to having no vision. Prov 29-18 says, “Where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint; but blessed is he who keeps the law.” Consequently, the generation following the hippy movement was a people without law and without vision. Then, just like the hippies who rebelled against their parents, the next generation rebelled against the hippy ideology and ran the opposite direction, picking up the worldliness of materialism as its new vision of utopia, which defines society today. However, the spoiled attitude of the hippies has remained in the social consciousness, and with each passing generation, America’s old-fashioned ethics of diligence and commitment are eroding and being replaced by a lazier, self-gratifying, pleasure seeking youth with no vision, being more spoiled than the first, which holds no promise of achieving their own materialistic goals. The intrinsic problem with the hippy movement was that they were eating the seed that their fathers in generations past grew for them, instead of planting it. Our present generation is still eating the seed and the day we run out of seed will be the last of our hope for a future. Each succeeding generation adopts all the bad habits of the generation before it by default, but rejects the good and right ways to live unless they are diligently taught. This is the ultimate cultural downfall and the Achilles heel that will lead to man’s inevitable demise. James R. Wuthrich www.jeansbiblestudy.com