From The News Journal letters to the Editor

Most baby boomers don’t care about WoodstockI was gratified to see a Jan. 1 article about baby boomers included recollections of people who have been living normal, productive lives, rather than fawning over musicians of the era and drug-addled hippies. As the article noted, hippies were just a “small sliver” of that generation.

I am fascinated by the media’s insistence that the baby boom generation was defined by Woodstock. No one I know remembers it that way. Woodstock had no effect on my life.

The history of the second half of the 20th century as covered by popular media appears to rely mostly on the hazy recollections of rich, white college types. People with jobs didn’t take a week off to go lie in the mud in upstate New York, smoke dope and listen to bands. The indulged children who returned from Woodstock to the perfumed salons of Northeastern academia regale us about the importance of everything they did. They could not face its overwhelming unimportance.

These people tell us that Bob Dylan spoke for the generation, while I personally don’t remember anyone listening to his music. Yoko Ono was a clown whose 15 minutes of fame expired around 1972.

The great majority of baby boomers have spent their lives working, raising families, studying or defending their country while the effete leisure class had time to sit around coffee houses nostalgically looking back on their college antics and imagining them to be defining moments for the rest of us.

While the rest of us admire such traits as reliability and honesty, their ultimate aspiration is to be thought of as cool and to belong. These people have become influential in media. Consumed with guilt about their affluence and having generally done nothing of importance in their lives, it is small wonder that they make showing up at a rock concert seem important. They have never grown up.

Scott M. Lehman, Newark

Thanks Scott, you rule…

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

View Technorati blog reactions.

Related Posts