I dreamed I saw the bomber jet planes riding shotgun in the sky
turning into butterflies above our nation....
US Person was in high school when half a million young people--representatives of the anti-war generation--without the aid of social media gathered at a dairy farmstead in upstate New York to enjoy rock music, drugs, and free love. Woodstock was a "happening" in the parlance of the time that may never be repeated again. Fifty years on, the aspirations of that generation now in their "golden years" have not been realized, but the spirit lives on.
It is highly appropriate that there is now political movement to make American society more equitable. Unlike fifty years ago, the movement has gained much political credibility as the masses become more aware of the gross exploitation by the plutocratic class. The US is still at war, but on a smaller scale than in Southeast Asia, and establishment political leaders are at least negotiating a way out of Afghanistan after eighteen years of failure. The nascent ecological movement then did not face the existential threat of global climate change, but it altered our thinking enough to grasp what the scientists are warning us will happen if we do not change our dysfunctional consumption of the Earth's limited resources: "We have to get ourselves back to the garden," CSN&Y sang to the crowd. To allow the movement to be co-opted by the corporatists as happened to the Populist Movement more than a century ago would be a betrayal of the promise of Woodstock. We can still turn the bombers into butterflies if we rock on!