Quick Fix: Woodstock, Your Brain on Rock and Roll

it was a blessing to have lived as a youth during that period. america was at its height of innovation and accomplishment. the people that made up the nation at that moment of social clarity made it for the most vibrant time in american history. it wasn’t about the drugs or entirely the music, it was about the comradery of strangers. those days are gone, just the tune of a dark and ugly humanity can be heard playing loudly these days.

“Maybe its the time of the year, or maybe its the time of man.” Or maybe it was both.
The late 1960′s were an intersection of two powerful currents- the energy and enthusiasm of youth, and a wider spirit of inspiration and regeneration. Young people are wired to rebel, and this one particular time, their rebellion helped to fuel a larger wave of creativity and hope.
If you were not alive then, it must be hard to imagine a time when the dominant attitude was optimism about changing the world for the better.

You ask what happened to the innovation… well let’s see- The birth or flowering of the many aspects of the civil rights movement. The tinkering hippies in their Palo Alto garages that brought some of the tech spinoffs of the Apollo Project down to our desktops. The environmental movement, which might still help to save our civilization from the floodwaters of climate change.
I did not use the words “social clarity,” it was not exactly a time of clarity. It was a time of inspiration. The clarity needed to follow in the next decades. But what happened instead was the massive rollback that Hunter Thompson described. Every party has a morning after- yes, we needed to finish college and get a job, so that we could settle and raise kids like you.
But more ominously, the forces of the far right found a winning coalition of racism (“The Southern Strategy”), fear (“Law and Order,” “The Evil Empire”), fake moral certitude and superiority (“Evangelical Christianity”), and a supposed pro-business stance (historic giveaways to the super-rich), all covertly financed by multinational corporations too busy off-shoring their taxable revenues and their employees to care very much about the American middle class. And all of that ginned up by hysteria over permanent distractions like abortion and gay rights.
Speak for yourself, Lee. Yes, I did go to college, get a good job, start a family, and buy a house (an actual “house” to live in, not a speculative “real estate investment vehicle”). But I did not sell out or forfeit my values, which is why I’m taking the time to reply to you now.
I remember reading that, on hearing John Lennon’s lyric “the dream is over,” Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane said “Well that’s too bad for you, poor mother#!$&, its not over for me.”