by David Rosman

Created on: September 03, 2009

A DECADE OF ILLS AND OF DREAMS FULFILLED Columbia, MO - Sometimes the news has to be fun. The octogenarians celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary or the new quintuplets born to a mother told she could not have kids. It is the same with our celebration of the 40th anniversary of the biggest party ever held on the planet, Woodstock. My own perspective will, most likely, be different from yours. Not only was I there (really), but I was backstage for a few hours helping my cousin's band find all of their instruments. As I was reminded last week, if everyone who claims to have gone to Woodstock was actually there, the sea of humanity would have been larger than New Jersey. However, for 300,000 to 400,000 souls, it was a weekend to escape from the rules of life, a weekend of experimentation and a weekend of music, dance and life. It was a weekend that the authorities said "Let it Be" and where those who though that these "commie, pinko, hippy freaks" would ruin the town of Bethel and the surrounding mountains of southern New York, found good kids helping their neighbors and cheering on the next rain storm. Woodstock was a celebration of life after a decade filled with death, violence and war; something today's depicters of Woodstock seem to have missed. The assassination of four primary leaders in the United States, Malcolm X, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bobby Kennedy. At 11-years old, I watched live coverage of the killing of accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby in the basement of the Dallas Police Department. That day is a bookmark in my life; a day that 11-year old became conscious of the world and politics that directly affect every person on the planet. It was a decade of domestic violence and domestic terrorism I pray we never see again. Riots in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Watts and too many other cities to name, destroying commerce and fellow citizens. It was a decade that brought the world to the doorsteps of nuclear war, starting with Cuba and stopping, but not ending in the rice patties of Southeast Asia. A door, to this day, that is still open. We saw political violence in Chicago and Washington, D.C. next to pictures and news concerning the deaths of our soldiers in Vietnam. We feared a Soviet nuclear attack as we did bombings of government buildings by domestic terrorists like the Students for a Democratic Society, the SDS. It was also a decade of achievements and striving for peace. Unprecedented demonstrations against

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