WOODSTOCK

 

The “younger generation” of every generation has always yearned for life, love and meaning. The older generation, the ones in power, have always, as a rule, reacted either by

1. making money off this naïve yearning
2. mocking and laughing at young people for their optimism
3. stereotyping   the young for their “rebelliousness” and “lack of initiative”.

I want to propose that the older generation has been lying to the younger. I believe the generation in power has always used that power to play a trick on their own children― they take advantage of their children’s ignorance and   play a game with them.

A game of hide and seek.

       And I think it’s time somebody blew the whistle.

I know what I’m talking about, because I know what WOODSTOCK meant to me when I was a teenager.

Well, I came upon a child of God

He was walking along the road

And I asked him, Tell me, where are you going? This he told me

Said, I’m going down to Yasgur’s Farm, Gonna join in a rock and roll band.

Got to get back to the land and set my soul free.

We are stardust, we are golden,

We are billion year old carbon,

And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Well, then can I roam beside you? I have come to lose the smog,

And I feel myself a cog in somethin’ turning. And maybe it’s the time of year,

Yes and maybe it’s the time of Man. And I don’t know who I am, But life is for learning.

We are stardust, we are golden,

We are billion year old carbon,

And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong

And everywhere was a song and a celebration.

And I dreamed I saw the bomber death planes Riding shotgun in the sky,

Turning into butterflies  Above our nation.

We are stardust, we are golden,

We are billion year old carbon,

And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

      (Words and Music by Joni Mitchell © 1969 by Siquomb Publishing Co.)

            It’s funny how that, if you really listen closely, you can hear one generation calling out to another.

What was Joni Mitchell saying here? (Keep in mind that Joni seems to be best known for the lyrics from her song “Big Yellow Taxi”: “Don’t it always seem to go/ That you don’t know what you’ve got till its gone/ They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

Joni was saying, we got to get ourselves back to the garden. 

    We got to get ourselves back to the garden.

There were half a million people there that week at Woodstock, and they all agreed,

“We got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

What was she talking about?

She was voicing what we all felt.

There was something missing, something BIG. The last generation had started out so strong, with so much hope and such big dreams. They’d even put a man on the moon. But something was missing― they didn’t have it, and they didn’t ―couldn’t― pass it on to their own kids .

Don McLean said it in his song American Pie, “a generation lost in space, with no time left to start again”. So this new generation was looking for real answers. (If they’d had the real answers, then they wouldn’t  be looking for them! )  John Philips (of ‘The Mamas & The Papas’) wrote in his song San Fransisco, “there’s a whole generation with a new explanation, people in motion, people in motion”― young people trying out a new explanation:

If you’re going to San Francisco

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair

If you’re going to San Francisco

You’re gonna meet some gentle people there

For those who come to San Francisco

Summertime will be a love-in there

In the streets of San Francisco

Gentle people with flowers in their hair

All across the nation such a strange vibration

People in motion

There’s a whole generation with a new explanation

People in motion people in motion

For those who come to San Francisco

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair

If you come to San Francisco

Summertime will be a love-in there

If you come to San Francisco

Summertime will be a love-in there

                                        ©John Philips

They were looking for an explanation. Something bigger than “billion year old carbon.” Remember the “billion year old carbon” was cooked up by the older generation, the ones with the power to change all the ideas, to rewrite all the books and doctor the curriculum.

And how did they doctor the curriculum?

They took the truth of God’s Word, the Bible, and trampled it into the mud. They poisoned the well. They set their theologian bulldogs against it and tore it to shreds.

And then they took the World which they had built (most of it on the foundation of the faith of the last generation) and passed it onto the next generation― “here it is kids, it’s all yours, take good care of it (like we did)”― but the tragedy of this farce is that they passed along the World, but they didn’t pass along the Word.

No wonder so many young people say, “there’s something happening here, I don’t know what it is, but I intend to find out.”

In effect, the kids are handed the responsibilities, but not the power.

They’ve got to be given the Power. The power is in the Word. The power is in the God of the Word, God who is waiting in the wings― with all the love and meaning that they― we― need to thrive.

Yes, it’s time to get back to the garden.

Click Here:HOW TO GET BACK TO THE GARDEN