Woodstock, The Shot Across The Bow of America

This past weekend was the fortieth anniversary of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair that took place on Max Yasgur’s farm in upstate New York in 1969. I find it amusing that Yasgur was a conservative republican who agreed to allow hippies to destroy his farm, but I guess he was paid enough money for the use of his land to make it worthwhile. I hope he made his money up front, because the promoters lost their shirts when the everything is about them spoiled brats, who showed up without tickets and had not intention of paying for admission tickets, knocked down the fences and declared it a "free" concert. I have always had mixed feelings about Woodstock. I was lured by the whole celebration of the primalism that it was, because I had received my proper dosage of liberal brainwashing in the public schools. However, I did have a few conservative teachers. There were still a few of them left when I was in school. They hadn’t been purged from the system yet.

I always thought the music was great. This was the music of my generation, both liberal and conservative. The bands that played there were rock music’s royalty. However, as I look back at it, I can see that it was the celebration of the left fork in the road of the two divisions of the Baby Boomer generation; there were those who came from a life of spoiled privilege and there were those that didn’t. Those that didn’t made up the right fork in the road, and the divide has been getting further and further apart as the years have progressed. Being part of that interim generation of the Baby Boomers that some demographers refer to as Generation Jones, I was too young to attend. I was only fourteen at the time, and there is no way that my World War II generation parents were going to allow me to attend an event of that kind anyway. My dad was a public school history teacher. Unlike most of the teachers today, and quite a few teachers at that time, the only liberal leanings he had were in regards to the New Deal. He thought the world of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Until he died, he remained a true patriotic American, who had no use for anti-Americanism.

His dad had been a builder, and had quite a bit of money until the Great Depression hit and he lost all of his business. From that point on they struggled financially just to survive. My mother grew up relatively poor in an Italian immigrant family with thirteen children who all ended up in some sort of blue-collar job, as they grew older. Not one of them went to college. They all struggled growing up. My dad served in the Army Air Corps in the Pacific during World War II, and he consequently had absolutely no respect for the anti-war crowd. All he saw were spoiled brats who were in dire need of a good beating. My mother’s brothers also all served in the military during the Second World War. The value of self-sacrifice that my parents grew up with, was part of my upbringing. We did without if we didn’t really need it. Luxuries were few and far between. As a schoolteacher he didn’t make a huge salary anyway. We were what would be considered to be lower middle class. We were the next rung up the food chain ladder from the working class. However, the working class and the lower middle class shared a lot in common, despite education and some minor value differences. We lived in the same neighborhoods, and we went to school together. One thing that was definitely shared in common was that many of the sons received a certified letter that required a proof of delivery signature that when opened began as follows: "Greetings." And guess what? They went to Viet Nam. You don’t hear much about these folks. Those that came back, which were all but 58,000 of them, got on with their lives. For the most part, they embarked on careers that pretty much made up the bulk of the working and lower middle classes, which is where they came from in the first place. However, first of all they had to endure getting spit upon, have feces thrown at them, and be called "baby killers" when they returned by the other fork in the road, the Woodstock Generation.

Let’s look at the demographics of that left fork in the road, the hippies and their ilk. Most of them grew up in a life of privilege. Few of them grew up working class or lower middle class. Many came from inherited wealth, but most of them were children of upper middle class professionals and left wing educators. They were spoiled. If they were the children of liberals and leftists in the education establishment, they were either open or closet Marxists. Everything was back then, and now that they are the establishment, about them. They despised back then, and still despise the working class and lower middle class whites. The hippies are now in charge of our government, legal profession, education system, and lurking in many of the policy-making positions of Corporate America and the Pentagon. This almost wasn’t the case.

In 1968 various radical student groups and racial groups, now revealed by the Venona Project to have been financed by the KGB in Moscow with millions of dollars smuggled in from Canada, became violent. These were cogs in the ongoing cultural war to destroy the United States from within. To this day, this "cold civil war" continues.

Members of these groups seized control of Columbia University in New York City. There were other riots at other colleges and universities that followed, but they probably wouldn’t have happened if the Columbia riots had been handled differently. Originally, the faculty of Columbia wanted the authorities to take back control of the campus by "any means necessary," but they backed down in their request at the last minute. Back then there were still quite a few college faculty members that were conservatives, but they were ultimately afraid of the political and social consequences of regaining control of the campus with force. This emboldened the Left, the Marxist Leninist funded by Moscow left mind you, to begin the acceleration of their assault on the American way of life. Let’s hear it again for the Woodstock Generation. Nelson Rockefeller was the governor of New York at the time, and had the faculty requested "assistance," he would have sent in the National Guard to storm the campus, and restore order using "any means necessary." The university president's decision not to request National Guard assistance was a huge mistake.

The Silent Majority, my father being one of them, would have stood up and cheered as the spoiled brats brandishing Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book were taken down. I remember seeing him smiling and hearing him say, "good, it’s about time," while he was watching the Chicago Police gave the anti-war protestors a good thrashing during the 1968 Democratic Convention riots. Even though he never said anything about it, I think that he silently cheered when the National Guard shot those four students during the Kent State riots too. As for me, now that I look back at that incident from the perspective of someone who is older, wiser, conservative, and a veteran, it shouldn't have happened. What should have happened was this: Since the protesters had burned down the ROTC building at Kent State, that should have been declared either an act of war by a domestic enemy within, or it should have been considered an act of sabotage against the government. The National Guard should have made it 400 or 4000 instead of 4, and the ring leaders should have been arrested, tried by military tribunal for sabotage and treason, and executed.

This error of cowardice on the part of the Columbia faculty was the turning point that set the stage for the Communist take over of our government that is attempting to come to fruition with the 2008 election. Woodstock in 1969 was the Left’s smug, arrogant, celebration of the beginning of the end of the despised values and prosperity of Middle Class America. With the final push happening today to force a socialist dictatorship on the American people, run of course, by the spoiled rotten leftists from the Woodstock Generation, I have a feeling that my dad is spinning in his grave.