Woodstock is a curious place. It is famous for a concert which it never held and as the spiritual epicenter of free thinking in the 60’s. Yet despite the occasional sign saying ‘hippies welcome’, on a snowy December evening before Christmas it looks more like a Republican fantasy of small town America. The setting for ‘A wonderful Life’, perhaps.
The hippies are old now, and they line up to protest the Iraq war as the bus to New York passes through.
In the background, an apathetic youth with hoodie and baseball cap perches on a mountain bike: gormless, slack-jawed and vacant.
If young people are less radical than their grandparents, society is abnormal compared to historical trends. More importantly, the historical precedent is that this kind of society is more likely to stumble into large scale conflict.