Woodstock

August 15-18, 2009 marked the 40th anniversary of the original Woodstock festival. The first Woodstock festival was held from August 15-18, at Bethel, New York. There have been namesake Woodstock festivals since that time. Woodstock was a music festival playing psychedelic rock and roll and many rock bands came to play in that event. There was a crowd that exceeded over 500,000 those three days. Woodstock commemorated the lives of the hippies. It was a festival that was supposed to celebrate peace and love. It was supposed to celebrate the age of the Aquarias. It commemorated the drug culture of the hippie movement.

John P. Roberts and Michael Lang were the two men that organized the event and had it advertised. There were numerous rock groups that performed such as the Grateful Dead, Jimmie Hendrix, Joan Baez, and Janis Joplin, to name a few. Taking drugs was part and parcel of the hippie culture. As the late Francis Schaeffer said, they took drugs as an ideology.

The hippie movement took shape in America in the early 1960's. If I was to pinpoint a certain event to mark the introduction of the hippie movement, it would probably be the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, California in 1964. It later degenerated into the Dirty or Filthy Speech movement where some students said four letter words over a microphone. The hippies gained a lot of notoriety in the latter portion of the 60's with the Vietnam War dragging on. They were a protest group that spoke out against the Establishment, racism, sexism, the Vietnam War, war in general, and the old-fashioned values many Americans had held dear at that time. They helped challenge the way America thought about life.

Francis Schaeffer had stated that the hippies were speaking out against the bankrupt values of "personal peace and affluence" that their parents embraced. Schaeffer had described those values as people that want to be left alone to do their own thing in life and not be bothered by anything or anybody's problems. Affluence means to own wealth. Schaeffer was saying many middle class parents were concerned about making money and living their own life. However, many parents didn't have a basis for their values. Families went to church because it was socially acceptable. Many of the hippies' parents upheld the values that their parents and grandparents passed 0n before them but they didn't have a basis for why those values were right. Many of the hippies' parents didn't have a relationship with the Lord. They just adopted the values they were taught growing up. Therefore, the hippie generation rebelled against that and they were trying to seek answers to questions in life. However, the hippies looked to drugs and protesting against the Establishment as the answer. However, the answer was the Word of God. What they needed was Jesus. But they looked in the wrong way.

Woodstock was an embodiment of the hippie counterculture. There was a movie made entitled "Woodstock" in 1970. They were promoting peace and love throughout the world. I remember an old Coke O' Cola commerical made a number of years ago during the Christmas season. It was an old song (tune) the hippies would sing but the words to that song was changed to make it a Coke commericial. These are the words: "I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, I like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company." The original version of the song goes like this: "I like to buy the world a home and furnish it with love. Grow apple trees and honey bees and snow-white turtle doves. I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. I'd like to hold it in my arms and keep it company." That symbolized the thinking of that generation. The Woodstock generation was into acid rock music and drugs. The Beatles revolutionized rock music. The Beatles changed their dress and appearance and many Americans patterned their appearance after the Beatles. It was cool to be hip during that time.

The hippies thought during the 60's they could change society from without. They thought they could change society on the outside. However, the changes the hippie generation sought during that decade had went unfulfilled. Then they modified their appearance in the 70's and 80's and became yuppies (young urban professionals). The hippie generation today is older and they are represented by such people as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the list continues. They are trying to change the system within. That's what they're doing today. The hippie movement has changed their brand and method. We have government leaders with that mentality in the Obama administration. They trying to make us into a socialist utopia where we can all get along together in peace and love. They want to destroy all racial and sexual barriers. They're trying to attain to the age of Aquarius.

It's tragic that the hippies had bought into a false notion of peace and love. Real peace comes through the Lord Jesus. They wanted to create a better and fairer society. However, they never found a basis for truth. The Woodstock generation didn't believe in absolute truth. Life is meaningless and not worth living if there are no absolutes. The only place to find absolute truth is the Word of God. Sadly, they were looking in the wrong direction.