How many of you remember 1969? I remember I was fourteen years old and having my ass wiped by a very mean lady by the name of Camille. She came ashore on the Mississippi Gulf coast and rearranged things. She parked tugboats in peoples front yards, bent whole pine forests over in one direction and tore huge oak trees right out of the ground, and removed peoples' houses altogether. No, Camille wasn't a particularly hormonal bitch, she was the strongest hurricane ever to hit the North American mainland up to that point (that we know of). At the time I was a "welfare kid" living with some salt-of-the-Earth foster parents in the back woods and bayous of the MIssissippi Gulf coast area, just east of Bay St Louis. That I am even lucky to be alive is what I remember most about 1969.

However, two even more remarkable events happened that year, one being the Apollo moon landing, and WOODSTOCK. Apollo was just hurling three men into orbit around the moon and setting them down on it without killing them, even getting them back here alive, but Woodstock, now THAT was something downright amazing! For three days, over HALF A MILLION people, mostly young people that worried the old people to death, crammed into a large pasture together to groove to some pretty good music, smoke some pot, make some love, play in the mud, and as far as I know, not one of them tried to kill someone. Even the cops thought it best NOT to wade into THAT crowd and hassle anybody. Imagine that.......

They only charged you $6.00 a day, $8.00 at the gate to attend. You can't even see a movie at the theatre these days for that, especially if you want popcorn. Of course, a lot more people came without tickets OR money than did, but by that time it was too late to worry about it. It didn't matter because something like this hadn't ever happened before (this many people coming together and NOT overthrowing a government or something) and the whole thing just wasn't about money when all was said and done. Subsequent efforts to repeat the experience never really measured up, and they cost a lot more money than the original. Yea, you can BUY a war, but you can't BUY peace, now can you?

We were a different breed of human back then, full of alternative ideas, and hope for a much brighter future than our parents had prepared us for. They fought a terrible war and raised the standard of living for all of their offspring, and we threw it back in their faces, preferring instead to try and get around this idea of money and killing and hating each other for stupid reasons. Only we all grew up. We got jobs. We couldn't stop war just because we wanted to, and many of us became our parents, carrying on this insane need for money and status and petty power politics, poisoning the planet and insulting Mother Nature instead of protecting her. So here we are, heading nilly-willy for an extinction event, forty years after proving to each other that we COULD play nice together, if only we wanted to.

We apparently don't want to, at least not badly enough.

But for three days in August of 1969, we did. I wonder why...........