Woodstock Festival
How did the Woodstock Music Festival in 1969 empower the youth of America?
Please provide sources if you have them.
please give answers that make sense. thanks.
I'm sorry, but I have to agree with the consensus opinion here -- Woodstock did nothing to "empower" anybody. It wasn't about empowerment; and anyone who says otherwise is flat out wrong. I realize that millions of people claim this -- but in fact, I WAS at Woodstock. And you HAVE to believe me, NOBODY was talking about empowerment -- we were all talking about sex, drugs and rock & roll.
Woodstock actually happened at the end of the era. By late 1969, the sixties were dying, and so was that mood of optimism. The real empowerment of America's youth occured years earlier, and was sparked by the spirit of optimism that came from the Kennedy Administration. It was later fueled by the injustices revealed by the growing Civil Rights movement, and brought to full fruition in the protests against the Vietnam War. THESE three things were empowering.
Woodstock was simply blowing off steam -- and I should know -- I was there. Cheers.
EDIT FOR "COOLIO":
Let me expand briefly on my earlier comments, as "coolio" has made unsupported statements. I was there, coolio, and I lived through that period. As I stated, the spirit of empowerment grew out of the earlier events of the Kennedy Administration, the Civil Rights Movement, and the hopes of a peaceful resolution of the Vietnam conflict.
By 1969, there was no empowerment left to be had. We'd seen the lies of the Johnson Administration laid bare in the disastrous Tet Offensive of 1968. We witnessed the assainations of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy. We saw the riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention, and then the election of Richard Nixon.
All of these things happened before Woodstock. By this time there was no more sense of "we have to rally the troops and make the world safe for flowers to grow." By 1969, nobody believed, as the Beatles' song says, that, "All you need is Love." The sixties were dying, and were soon going to give up the ghost.
By the 1970s, that spirit of "Change the World" mutated into what Tom Wolfe called the "Me Decade," in which burned out hippies gave up on the idea of externally improving the world, and instead focused on the internal drive to improve their own lives through excessive self-indulgence.
I'm not trying to be patronizing, coolio, but you wrote a thousand word essay -- congratulations. I lived through this time, and I think I know more about what it meant, and how it mutated.
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