WOODSTOCK NOTIONS

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BY THE TIME WE GOT HOME FROM WOODSTOCK
THERE WAS A DRAFT NOTICE IN THE MAILBOX

HOW THE BOOMERS STOPPED THE VIETNAM WAR OR DIED TRYING

In Answer To An Ignorant Late-Boomer

It never ceases to amaze us how some people can just drift through life without ever realizing what is happening around them. It’s astonishing to hear the absurd notions of birthers and deathers, but they are not the first nor will they be the last to attempt to cobble together their own reality, with no factual input whatsoever. We usually associate this sort of ideation and behavior with the lunatic fringe of the American right wing. But here we have an example of similar historical distortion and delusional thinking from a supposed Leftist. His “rant” is relatively fact-free, and we have corrected his historical distortions, below:

SUZIE-Q
“The “Woodstock Generation” 40 Years on”
He often wonders, but he never thinks, or researches.

‘ I often wonder what Lady Emma might have thought about the so-called “sixties revolution”. There certainly was a lot to dance to, that’s for sure. But in the final analysis, I imagine she might have been just a bit disappointed with the Woodstock Generation. To be honest with you, I have always been a bit cynical on the subject of the Baby Boomers. The dirty little secret that no one (as far as I know) has yet dared to write about is that the youth revolt of the 1960s was born of out of the fact that the sons-of-privilege believed that the Vietnam War should have been fought by everyone and anyone but themselves ‘

First of all, the initial motivation for the “youth revolt” or “The Movement,” as we called ourselves, was not the Vietnam War but concern for others and for the planet itself: Banning the A-bomb, Civil Rights and conservation/ anti-pollution/ healthy foods, all going back to the 1940’s & ’50’s. The Vietnam War did not become a huge issue until well after the first large contingent of Marines landed there in August of 1965. U.S. casualties did not hit shocking levels until 1967, and they were not exactly trumpeted by the Johnson Administration at the time. The two great images from the war that shocked us all were not seen until 1968 and 1972. The fact is, most people of every age group in the 1960’s were simply unaware of what was going on in Vietnam, or even where it was, up until the disastrous Tet Offensive of 1969: You can blame the corporate media for that. They simply weren’t giving the war much play up until then. And most people tuned it out because, up until then, not that many people had family or friends that went to Vietnam. That began to change by 1969, after the third full year of full-scale war for large American ground combat units. That was the point also when images of the devastation the United States was wreaking upon the Vietnamese people themselves became the issue, not saving our own “privileged” asses, as the “video artist” puts it, above.

(continues)
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