Woodstock Forever

James M. Shelley, Woodstock 1969

The event that drew almost half a million of my peers to a farm in upstate New York in August 1969 wasn’t supposed to be a free concert.  Rejected by several town boards, the four young promoters finally found a venue, a dairy farm in Bethel, New York.  They didn’t have the time or money to fence it all in. 

It didn’t matter.

Revolution was in the air.  We’d taken it to the streets.  We’d occupied buildings.  Now nearly half a million young people headed for the hills—and the fences came down.  The spirit of the times prevailed.  The white dove that had been perched on the neck of a guitar on the iconic Woodstock Music and Art Fair poster took flight, descended on the crowd, and made history.
 
It didn’t make money though.  After the event that captured the heart of my generation, the promoters—and presumably the 450,000 folks who’d gone down to Max Yasgur’s farm to set their souls free—ended up taking a bath.

The movie that was released the following spring etched Woodstock into the collective consciousness of a generation.  What had been a mixed bag for those on the ground—and in the mud—became larger-than-life on the big screen.  The spirit of the times that had transformed a disaster area into a peaceful community (where the head of security was a clown with a kazoo), now touched tens of millions of us.  And, of course, a few folks made a bundle.

I didn’t make it to Woodstock 1969.  It didn’t matter.  The genie was out of the bottle.  The word was on the streets.  The following summer, I drove west in a Volkswagen Beetle and watched the heart and soul of my generation play out on screen, through a cloud of cannabis smoke, in a crowded theater in San Francisco.

With peace signs flashing, the leftist folk music of the early sixties danced onto the stage with the electrified blues and acid rock that had erupted on the left coast’s hotbed of be-ins and a Summer of Love.  Through a kaleidoscopic swirl of images and sounds, we long-haired hippies constructed a massive stage and drove tractors.  We danced and did yoga amidst teepees and gaily painted school buses.  We skinny dipped, then rolled up our sleeves to answer the call to, as Wavy Gravy famously put it, “serve breakfast in bed for 400,000.”

It was a revival meeting.  The spirit of the times danced with the timeless.  In cinematic communion, we were living the dream.

In that dream, martyred union organizer Joe Hill appeared on Joan Baez’s breath and encouraged us to organize.  In that dream, bomber death planes turned into butterflies.  With irreverent reverence, Country Joe McDonald took the pulpit and yelled, “Give me an F,” and we did just that—with a roar! When Joe Cocker proclaimed “I get by with a little help from my friends,” we knew it was gospel. We rocked.  We rolled.  We laughed.  We cried.  Then, as dawn emerged, Jimi Hendrix captured the fury and anguish of the war that raged halfway round the world.  His “Star-Spangled Banner” became our national anthem. J oni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” became our “Rock of Ages.”

We’d been to the mountaintop. We were about to change the world. Or so we thought.
(READ MORE )

They Just Washed Away 
Katrina a Man-made Disaster: Before, During, and After

Hurricane Katrina Takes Aim on the Gulf Coast

It still breaks my heart to cast my mind's eye on the Horror that swept through New Orleans in August of 2005.

Sometimes I still come to tears as I attempt to sing "Washed Away." The song wrote me ten years ago as I was apartment sitting for a friend in Queens, NY.   Choked with pain and anger, appalled at what was I was seeing on TV and the web, it was, and still is, difficult to accept that what transpired in New Orleans could happen in the wealthiest nation on earth.

(Click for lyrics)

Made in the U.S.A.

Although Hurricane Katrina, the ferocious vortex that was born over the Atlantic Ocean during the sultry days of late August that year was a "natural" phenomenon, what happened a decade ago was not. It was, from beginning to end, a man-made disaster, a glaring example of the continued institutional racism of the neo-liberal era.

In line for evacuation buses at the Superdome

The catastrophic series of events that decimated New Orleans, killing 1836 people (nearly a 1000 of them in the City itself), and displacing a million and a half others in the region, had been predicted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Officials at FEMA knew that the 100 year old system of levees and flood control protecting the half a million residents of the City, nearly 70% of whom were Black, couldn't withstand the force of a hurricane of that magnitude.  They had reported repeatedly that there was no adequate system in place to evacuate the people at risk.

Then, the buck was passed -- or the bucks, rather.  In a glaring example of Crony Capitalism at it's worst, FEMA privatized New Orlean's Disaster Planning in 2004!

This is all a matter of public record.  It's there in black and white. 

Those in charge knew.  Many of the career government service professionals were on record, trying to address the problem.

In fact, just three months before Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Federal Agency responsible for flood control, had issued another warning to the Bush Administration which had not yet acted to implement a flood control plan involving extensive construction they had proposed years earlier.
(READ MORE)

My Country 'Tis of Thee

Sitting here on a steamy July 4th morning, I'm well aware that patriotic fervor will parade through the streets of America today, then explode into fireworks as the sun sets from sea to shining sea.

Yet, at this moment, I can't imagine singing "America" without breaking into tears.  Love is like that.  It breaks your heart.

It I were to try to describe my relationship to the United States of America, the first thought is "it's complicated."   Yet, that's too easy.

When I hold that question close to my heart, marriage vows come to mind.  At age 73, it's pretty clear that, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, my fate is sealed.  I ain't going anywhere.  It is "'til death do us part."

Yet, this doesn't mean I accept the blind patriotism that has been hurled, often quite angrily, at me over the years in various settings as I've cajoled, marched, and rallied in the cause of peace.  Encountering faces contorted by fear, enmity, and deep, un-examined prejudice, hasn't been easy.  It's obvious that they are having a hell of a time of it.  My heart goes out to them.  With all due respect, I don't think they get it.

I'd wager that many of those who claim "my country right or wrong," is their bottom line never read past the semi-colon in the original quote.  A German immigrant, public servant, and journalist, Carl Shurz spoke these words on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1872:

"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right."

Then...

American was a different place when I was growing up. 

After capitalism hurled itself over the edge in 1929, a new consensus had been formed.  The post-war WW2 Republican Party, still imbued with a sense of common decency, accepted that the government had a crucial role in establishing justice and promoting the general welfare.  President Eisenhower, a Republican, labeled those who opposed the New Deal as "stupid" in 1952, and later put the power of the Federal troops behind the Supreme Court decision that segregation laws were unconstitutional.  He also coined the term "military-industrial complex" and warned of it having undo influence as he left office.  A couple of decades later another Republican President, Richard Nixon, signed landmark environmental legislation and Medicare into law, famously claiming, "we are all Keynesians now."

Even though we had to hit the streets during the civil rights, anti-war movements, and environmental movements of the 1960's and 1970's to push things along, there was a sense that the course of human history was basically progressive.  It seemed that we, as a people, were basically decent.  Although there was resistance, at times violent, from the fringes of society, it seemed we the people were in the process of increasingly "setting it right."

And Now...

After several decades of well-financed and pervasive organizing throughout all the major institutions in society, viewpoints that were once considered aberrant are now mainstream.

A mean-spirited and arrogant cadre of talk show hosts, print pundits, and media personalities led the way.  Some of them drifted directly into public office.

Over time, attitudes and behaviors that were decidedly uncool when I was growing up, seized center stage.  They then shouted down those accustomed to civil discourse and statesmanship.

And now, after the continual erosion of common decency, we have a bully in the presidential pulpit mocking those who oppose him -- and threatening those who challenge him with violence.  On his watch we've seen what was once unimaginable become commonplace.

So, today, I'll allow myself to grieve.

Tomorrow, I'll roll up my sleeves and continue to do what I can do about setting it right.

Suffer the Little Children

"A person's dignity does not depend on them being a citizen, a migrant, or a refugee. 

Saving the life of someone fleeing war and poverty is an act of humanity."

-- Pope Francis, affirming the 

US Council of Bishops' statement that 

Trump's border policy

is "immoral."

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
-- Emma Lazarus

from "The New Colossus"

It's enough to make a grown man cry.  

I've come to tears a number of times these past few days observing the results of the Trump Administration's "zero tolerance" border policy on countless refugee families.

The stark reality of innocent children being separated from their parents and siblings to then be put into cages is nothing less than a freakin' abomination.  It's senseless and cruel -- and a violation of the tenets of the UN Convention on refugees.   

It's also immoral.  

Lest my lack of credentials other than that of being the founding S.O.B.* makes that claim a bit presumptuous, Pope Francis, the US Catholic Council of Bishops, and numerous other clergy worldwide, with the appropriate certificates hanging on their walls, agree with me.  Can you imagine it otherwise? After all, in what bizarre parallel universe would Jesus of Nazareth sanction the lack of decency that would allow Trump and his lackey Jeff Sessions to edit the plaque on the Statute of Liberty to read: 
                                             "Give me your tired, your poor,
                                                Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
                                                 -- and I will separate the children from their parents
                                                 and throw them all in jail!?"

If the Prince of Peace were in the flesh today, He'd be much more likely to hustle His ass into DC and turn the tables on this crew of miscreants.  He's been known to do such things back in the day.  Self-styled Christian VP Mike Pence would be the first to get a hypocrite's heave ho into the fiery pit. 

(Of course, as always, if these guys would finally come to their senses to see that Satan has hoodwinked them, their sins would be forgiven.  Sadly, I'm not holding my breath here. )

Besides the moral outrage I feel, I take this one personally.  

As a 12-year-old boy, having been abandoned with my younger brother and sister in a train station in East St. Louis, Illinois, I spent several days in a detention center.  Although my mother had been swept away by her own's demons, leaving me as the oldest child to protect my siblings, I was treated with compassion and respect by the police officer charged with sweeping me up into his arms and carrying me off.  Kicking and screaming all the way, at one point I bit his arm.  Without flinching, he responded gently and kindly in a language that I could understand, "It's going to be alright, son."

I can only imagine the terror being experienced by the estimated 3500 refugee children, most who don't even speak English, some of who have been injected with anti-psychotics for resisting their imprisonment, as they have been forcibly separated from their parents.  In my case, it was a matter of days before my father was contacted and we were freed to become part of the American Dream.  In those days, he readily found another union factory job and moved us out of Chicago into what was then an idyllic small town near the Wisconsin border.  

Today after decades of decline, both economically and morally, these poor kids face an American Nightmare instead.  Even when and if they are re-united with their parents, they face the probability of long-term incarceration -- for under the leadership of the misanthropes, militarists and materialists of the Republican Right we have become a nation that imprisons refugees! 

This is a crying shame.  

It's time for all people of good will to cry "shame on you" and let Trumposaurus Wrecks and the Republican-controlled Congress know that we won't sit idly by and allow this to continue.   

This is not the America we grew up with -- and this is not the America we wish to be today. 

Don't sit idly by.  Take a stand.

An Action to Consider:  
Find an Event Near You*

 

https://front.moveon.org/

*Greenfield Local Action:

Families Belong Together Rally

Saturday, June 30 at 1:30 p.m.
Hosted by Trystan and Arjuna G.
Greenfield Town Common
Greenfield, MA 01301

Rally on the Town Common in support of immigrants and asylum seekers, and to protest the Trump administration's cruel policies. 

Families Belong Together! 1-2:30 pm

SIGN UP TO ATTEND