Thirty years into the bygone when Wood-stock happened for the first time it was, in a sense, the climax of the youth movement which began early in the sixties. It sent a message of peace and love to the people of the world and enforced upon the global leaders an introspection vis-a-vis the futility of war.A fortnight back, when Woodstock '99 ended, it left a trail of mob frenzy and destruction. Hundreds of revellers went on a burning and looting spree in a violent finale to the three-day musical concert. ``Concert-goers set fire to 12 tractor trailers, looted booths and toppled stage lights and speakers. People were screaming and crying. It was very confusing and chaotic,'' said an agency report. And, above all, it sent no message for a peaceful world order.The Woodstock generation, which came of age in the early sixties, was in many ways a maverick generation by contemporary standards. But then there were many a positive side to it. A new genre of music was its most powerful medium of expression. It was one of love, universal fraternity and peaceful co-existence.The genesis of Woodstock, what was also called Love Festival, can be traced back to a 1964 Ed Sullivan Show which welcomed a new group of Englishmen to America - the Beatles. Their songs along with those of the American Bob Dylan and dozens of popular rock groups expressed the new attitude of a generation unwilling to blindly accept the values of its parents.In the next five years the country was confronted with a phenomenal change in its youth. The ``silent generation'' of the fifties gave way to the ``loudly protesting'' generation of the next decade. Campus protests that were ignited over free speech, student rights and other local issues were rapidly replaced by nationwide demonstrations against the Vietnam war.Later in the decade, young people began to look different. Men began to wear their hair long and to grow beards; women began to wear less makeup and adopted a ``natural'' look. Both wore the universal uniform of youth - blue jeans. Drugs, especially marijuana and LSD, became very popular even among high school students. Across the land hippies, then ``flower children'' and finally ``Jesus freaks'', commune-dwellers and dropouts shocked their elders.With the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, all of the tensions between the generations and the classes - most college students and hippies were from middle-class families - erupted when the Chicago police attacked anti-war demonstrations in what an investigation later termed as a police riot. The whole nation watched the melee on TV sets and the Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey went on to lose the presidential election to Richard Nixon.The next year, about 500,000 young people made their way to a farm near Woodstock in New York to attend an outdoor rock festival. It was a peaceful occasion and marked the climax of the youth movement. But the new generation of Americans continued to feel strongly inclined to challenge big business and big government, and a growing number of older citizens had begun to share their concern with the quality of life in the United States and to try to change it.In stark contrast, Woodstock '99 was devoid of an aim, let alone an achievement. What could have been a peaceful protest against nuclear proliferation in general and military showmanship of the United States in particular, with the Gulf and Kosovo as backdrops, ultimately turned out to be a show of the macabre by a disoriented and rudderless generation. Top
