Remembering Woodstock 55 Years Later

You probably missed the notification but, thankfully for you, I’m here to rectify that whiff.

Woodstock happened fifty-five years ago, in the small town of Bethel, New York, August 15-18, 1969, a cultural event the likes of which we have not seen since.  There are several excellent documentaries available; if you’ve never seen one of them, I highly encourage you to do so, for Woodstock may well be the only time in human history when a half-million people came together, for a three-day event, and did so peacefully.

And what does that say about we humans?  Can you imagine any event, in the year 2024, with half a million humans congregating, and not one fist fight occurring?  Not one shooting? Not one bomb threat? Not one assault? Not one rape? Not one armed robbery?

It defies logic and yet it happened, on Max Yasgur’s farm, long ago and far away.

The HOW of it happening is almost as remarkable as the actual event.

Remember, this was before the internet . . . long before. It was originally planned to be an art and music festival in Woodstock, with an expected crowd of approximately 20,000 people for three days.  It was advertised in “underground newspapers,” the only marketing it received, and when the first site was chosen, and plans began to formulate, 20,000 was still the prediction.  But word spread, through those underground newspapers, through whatever pipelines were available, and soon people from coast-to-coast were thinking that the little festival in New York might be worth attending, especially when it became known that some of the biggest names in the music industry would be playing.

One month before the event was to happen, the original site of the festival, the town of Wallkill, New York, cancelled the contract, fearing the crowd would be too large; in fact construction on the stage and fencing had begun when the town cancelled, leaving the promoters with one month to not only find a new site but also prepare that site for what they now realized was going to be a much larger crowd.  Finally, a farmer in Bethel, New York, Max Yasgur, agreed to lease his dairy acreage for the event.  The promoters had just enough time to construct the stage and provide the necessities like water, power, and rest rooms before the crowds began to arrive, flooding the nearby town, jamming all roads with a massive traffic mess. By the first day of the event, 300,000 had arrived; by the next day, the crowd had swelled to 500,000, and somehow, some way, the event happened without any violence.

Love and safety . . . two basic needs for humans, which I’ve written about before.  Set aside all other differences, all other divisions, all of the superfluous b.s. which separate us today . . . love and safety have brought us together in the past and, I believe, can bring us together in the future. We simply need to set aside our differences and be willing to find commonalities.

A pipe dream? I hope not. We need each other desperately.