PROCEED
TO COMMENTARY
WOODSTOCK
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Following
is an interview and subsequent commentary of a teenage couple taken from
the Woodstock film created 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