Last Sunday, August 16, Chris's panel included Ms. CNBC Trish Regan, John Heileman, Rick Stengel, and  Kathleen Prissy-Pants Parker.  It was quite the Algonquin Round Table he'd assembled.  The last segment concerned the "Woodstock Nation" meme as it related to, or didn't relate to, the Obama election.   I assume by the term they meant the counter-culture, not just festival attendees. The group seemed in hearty agreement on most of these notions:

That the 500,000 in attendance were monolithic, that they were drug-crazed dropouts who contributed nothing to society; they were anti-establishment, puerile, and are invisible now.  It is great sport to laugh at the 60's counter-culture and dismiss us all as spoiled, lazy kids having tantrums against the conventional adult world.  There are plenty of ironies about the movement, but so shallow an analysis misses many marks.

My husband and I have talked about it for a week, and I would like to offer some other perspectives.

A lot of forces coalesced in the sixties and contributed to the "counter-culture."  The first thing that leaps to most people's mind was the War in Viet Nam.  The hundred of thousand of troops deemed necessary to fight the Commie Menace to stop the Domino Effect necessitated a draft, which was a prime motivator for protests.  It was supremely clever a move to go to an all-volunteer army, and then hire mercenaries as needed; a true win-win scenario for a nation that is based on corporate war.

The advent of the birth control pill changed sex for millions.  With pregnancy no longer an absolute consequence of fooling around, it tended to give rise to sexual freedoms that on one hand, decreased inhibitions and improved sexual satisfactions; on the other hand, made sex a little less meaningful, perhaps too casual.

As pregnancy became  more of a choice, women felt new freedoms, and new questions arose as to what women could choose to do with their lives and careers.  As women found certain career doors closed to them, the Women's Movement was born.  The early meetings of Women's Lib I attended were trite and mundane, discussions of the mandatory bra, hubby won't wash the dishes, etc.  But the topics grew over the years to re-balancing the power structure both in relationships and the work place.  The beginnings of the Equal Rights Amendment were born.  (Wow; whatever happened to the passage of that law?)  There was a natural flow of Civil Rights that began to embrace minority rights.

As college campuses became focal points for the movement, University curriculum came under increased scrutiny; there were demands for Ethnic studies, Women's studies, more accurate, less Euro-centric history, etc.  A lot of those demands were met, partially because they were correct demands., and would improve the colleges.

The youth of the country began to question if the pursuit of money were a noble goal, whether working in a cubicle for a faceless capitalistic corporation could satisfy them.  Some folks tried out the peace corps; some created their own healthy businesses; some attorneys became public defenders; some took on class-action lawsuits against polluting corporations.  Idealism ran high.  Of course many went back to the money-making grind; idealism didn't always buy shoes for the babies.  But some good, noble service organizations got their starts in the era.

In Boulder,  hippies learned to share; we learned that we really were our brothers' keepers.  Whether we knew it or not, lots of us tried to emulate Christ's life, and share what we had, and accept help from others when they had, and we didn't.  Many learned to meditate, to value peace and broader humanistic values.  We learned the most insidious lesson of all:  to question authority.  Some of the protests led to absurd take-overs of government buildings, they were well-intentioned, but half-baked, and really did no harm.  But the actions often gleaned attention for unconventional arguments which gained popularity among the public.

And I will say that in our county, at least 80% of the participants of our Peace Demonstrations are Boomers, and I would guess most were or are still hippies.  Nationwide, plenty of the generation eventually ran for public office, some of them successfully.

"Pot-smoking hippies" is no-doubt a pretty fair concept.  But to my mind, the more important drug was LSD.  In the beginning, it was a bit more like a sacrament, a ritual, an experiment about expanded consciousness described by John Lily and others.  My sense is that many of the folks who became so eco-conscious and involved in planetary health issues were influenced by it.  We are told that lysergic diethylamide changes the quality of the neuro-transmitter chemical packets passed between the dendrites of nerve cells.  But that doesn't tell you much about the ways in which your perceptions could change to actually see the organic nature of all life, and the increase awareness of the inter-connectedness of it all.  It's so easy to poke fun at it all now; I've had the discussions with straight people a thousand times.  And there was good acid (pure) and bad acid, "Hey, man, don't eat the brown acid; it's baaaad"  (corrupted with other chemicals)  -announced at Woodstock.

Later the Boomers began posing questions about mind-body issues, i.e. "Were mind and body discrete entities, or could they be inter-related, and what are alternative ways we can get and stay healthy?"  The New Age movement eventually got commercial and thus a bit crappy, but Alternative Health ideas have stayed.  Over half the health care dollars in the U.S. are spent on alternatives to AMA practices.

Humor also changed during this period, and God knows music did.  Those are subjects too wide to discuss here. 

Back to the Matthews panel:  Toward the end of the discussion, Ang Lee's new film on the making of Woodstock came up.  It was yes, oh yes, decided that:  The film will tank at the box office.  That financial failure will at last  put the final nail into the coffin lid of the Woodstock Generation concept.  Asshats.

http://video.thechrismatthewsshow.com/player/?fid=31183#videoid=1145534

(Click on Weekend of Aug.15/16; hover your cursor over and click about ¾ of the way across the play bar.)