Scott Hettrick
I can’t help but contrast the images of the recent volatile Town Hall meetings and the raging radio show hosts and their angry and beligerent callers with the coverage of the 40th anniversary of peace and love at Woodstock, my experience at Woodstock ’99, and my recent experience of being trapped in a Sig-alert on the freeway.
In the latter case, it recently took me 2 1/2-hours to move only 1 1/2 miles on a weekday morning as we approached the merging of the 57 and 60 freeways where a tractor-trailer carrying paint had tipped over. What I found the most remarkable was that I never heard a car honk the entire time and never saw a single enraged driver try to make a dangerous move to push his way past the others.
No doubt most or all of us had appointments to keep or places to be – I was due at a late morning conference at a convention in San Diego for which I was clearly going to be very late or miss entirely. Granted, there are many more things to do in a car these days to pass the time — I was e-mailing, texting, tweeting, checking the stock market, making cell calls, listening to music and traffic reports, and even reading several newspapers. But that doesn’t take away the frustration of 2 1/2-hours of lost time ticking away a minute at a time with no way to know if it will last another five minutes or five hours.
And yet, despite the perception of road rage on California highways and how quickly drivers most anywhere will flip you the finger and yell obscenities at you for nothing more than inadvertantly cutting them off when switching lanes (a colleague calls it “going from Zero to ‘FU’ in two seconds”), this time there was no evidence of any of that. It was as if everyone gratefully adopted the attitude that it was obvious we were going to be there awhile so there’s no advantage in getting stressed about it and making a bad situation worse; might as well just make the best use of the time. Witnessing such mature behavior almost made the delay worthwhile. Well, not really, but it was at least something good to take away from the experience.
In reflecting on the Woodstock Festival of 1969, if anyone had reason to be angry and upset, it was those concertgoers who arrived at an event that got so big and out-of-control that they were forced to abandon their cars in the middle of small, narrow roads and walk for miles to get to a show where they had inadequate water, food, and medical supplies and not nearly enough toilets. On top of that, they had no shelter during several inches of rain that left the entire grounds a giant mud field.
And yet, despite those conditions (and many say in large part because of those conditions), crowds were remarkably well-behaved and most came away with the feel-good experience of a lifetime.
I happened to attend Woodstock 1999 in Rome, also upstate New York, on the way back from the Hall of Fame induction ceremony of George Brett in nearby Cooperstown. Taking a chance that like the previous Woodstocks in ’69 and ’94, crowds might again become so large that event organizers would stop taking tickets, I found a shuttle bus at a nearby strip mall and simply walked into the former Air Force base and began wading into the crowds of more than 200,000 people. Even though this Woodstock event became known as the one with all the violence and commercialism, the fires and most of the violence didn’t erupt until the final hours of the final day, just as I was leaving and darkness was imminent. I began leaving as local and state officials took the stage about 7 p.m. to praise the producers for such a well-organized event, declare the Festival a huge success, and invite them back. As I drove away I could see bonfires erupting in the distance and I later heard reports of violence and looting.
Until those final hours, my experience was exactly the opposite. The throngs of attendees were extraordinarily well-behaved. In fact, on the one or two occasions when I saw one individual getting a little too upset and another getting a little too stoned, fellow festival participants took control of the situation themselves. In each case, several others immediately swarmed to these individuals — complete strangers, mind you — and brought them under control in seconds, then stayed with them until they were sure everything was calm.
Don’t get me wrong; there were people walking around naked, some getting tattooed, and all manner of narcotics in varying degrees of use. None of that was unexpected and it was all part of the experience. It took me nearly an hour to snake my way through more than a hundred thousand people at one of the two performance stages to within a few feet of the mosh pit where revelers were banging hard into each other and throwing each other in the air. I was already a grey-haired old man of 42 in 1999 but at no point as I wound my way past people on the way in or out was I ever met with any hostility, pushing, shoving, or unkind words or looks.
I could not have been more proud of the youngsters and attendees as I left the grounds. How sad that the last couple of hours of destruction by a few of those who stayed too long at the three-day party became the legacy of that Festival.
And how sad that more of the people who incite hatred and disrespect and spew such venom on radio and TV shows, on Internet blogs and forums, and at recent Town Hall meetings, don’t take the attitude of the people who were in that Sig-alert last month, at Woodstock in 1999, and at Woodstock in 1969. In each of those cases, everyone was in the same situation and managed to make the best of it without getting angry, without yelling, and without being disrespectful to each other.
Who knows, with that approach we may all wind up being a little happier and maybe even have the experience of a lifetime!