maybe it's just the time of the year or maybe -

mary louise perkins and me in the teepee circle at camp winnarainbow.

from summertown to laytonville, still out to save the world.

I sometimes take a look at the Bradenton Herald, the mullet-wrapping rag from the town where I went to high school. They found some locals who were at Woodstock and put together an article of reminiscences. The last line of the article, from a woman who was at the festival really ticked me off, and I fired off a letter.

Editor:

Re: "Manatee Remembers Woodstock on 40th anniversary," I'm quoting Nancy Hartman "It was the feeling like we could change the world - and then we grew up and didn't do it." We certainly did. I encourage Ms. Hartman to give her point of view a second look.

In only six years our country witnessed the assassinations of President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. Instead of responding with despair and cynicism, the movement that Abbie Hoffman called Woodstock Nation continued to dream of a world where, as Dr King hoped, "little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

A few weeks before that legendary festival of 3 Days of Peace and Music, the entire world watched as the astronauts of Apollo 11 walked on the moon. The Apollo missions gave us a belief that anything is possible. Not always acknowledged but ultimately more important, the Apollo missions gave us for the first time a photograph of a world without borders, without segregation, without arbitrary divisions that said one group is any more deserving of resources, status or privilege than another. For the first time, we could look back at Earth from the orbit of the moon and see breathtaking photographic evidence of the beauty of our home, viewed from space. For many of us, that picture told a simple story that said “we are all in this together.”

hippies of 1969 were young people with an idealism that was forged with determination. They wanted to put the privilege of upbringing and education to use to further not only personal ambitions, but to further an ambitious collective goal of making the world a better place for those who share it, and for the generations who will come after. As a result, it is no longer counter-cultural to work to advance the rights of people of color, or for a young woman to expect to have the same opportunity to play high school or college sports or to have the same career opportunities open to her as any young man would have. It is no longer counter-cultural to pursue the desire to know where your food comes from, how it was grown, what ingredients are in it, and to know it is possible to live in a world where no one has to go hungry. It is no longer counter-cultural for a woman to give birth with the father of her children beside her supporting her during the delivery. It is no longer counter-cultural to recycle, to use solar power, to care about the ozone layer. It is no longer counter-cultural to question authority. It's no longer counter-cultural to think you can end a war by demanding an end to all war. If they did anything, hippies reminded the citizenry what an American Revolution can accomplish.

We, the spiritually committed visionaries called "hippies," aspired then and continue now to hold our government and citizens to the words of Thomas Paine. "When shall it be said in any country of the world, my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am the friend of its happiness: when these things can be said, then may that country boast of its constitution and government."

To the extent that we still live in a world where there is war, greed, discrimination and damage to the environment, consider this: the anti-establishment Woodstock generation did change the world, but the established interests who profit from war, greed, discrimination and destruction have done their worst to halt and undo those changes.

On the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock, instead of asking if a concert changed the world, ask yourself what you've done to change it.