Protesting the lack of protests

I am starting off today's post with a video from Woodstock. This performance of Volunteers by Jefferson Airplane raises two questions in my mind.

First, what happened to being cool? I don't mean pretending to be cool by buying pre-torn jeans at the mall or obsessing over a costly hairstyle that is meant to look messy but really isn't. I mean making due with what you have to form your own individual style. Everything, including music, is so packaged and overproduced these days that nothing feels authentic or original.

Of course, if you didn't live in non-conformist times, you probably don't realize what is missing in today's culture. Heck, even many of the people who are now in their 50s and 60s have forgotten what it means to be cool, to not accept certain societal norms, to speak up when blatant wrongs arise. Maybe that's just a result of getting older. One gets tired fighting the man. Conformity and acceptance become the easier path, I suppose.

Additionally, where have all the protest songs gone? If there was ever a time for musicians to rally around big causes, it's now. We have two wars that have lasted longer and cost more than any war in our history. Even proponents of the war can't define victory.

So why aren't today's musicians writing songs that address wars, oil spills, corporate greed, political corruption and so forth? I don't have an answer, I just know that creative people jumped all over stuff like this in the 1960s and 70s, and it led to some of the best songs ever written. Songs with something important to say that changed America for the better.

Maybe the Vietnam War hit closer to home because we had a military draft. Perhaps if kids today were forced to fight in ill-conceived wars more people would pay attention to what is going on in the news. Maybe a draft, in an odd sense, was a good thing. As the war in southeast Asia dragged on, parents of sons reaching draft age began to question why we were in Vietnam. I can recall my father suggesting that I bolt for Canada if I was drafted. My father was not a liberal-minded person, so this was an interesting stance for him to take. Luckily, the war ended long before I turned 18.

Yes, groups like Jefferson Airplane probably did too many drugs and Woodstock wasn't quite as peaceful or productive as some like to remember. I am not glorifying everything from that era. But at least there was some awareness of issues like pollution, war and discrimination that felt more embedded into the culture than they do now. It was as if everyone had a stake in what was happening in the world, not just in their little corner of it, but across the country and even the globe. Sometimes that led to conflicts and rioting, but it also meant people were engaged. They read newspapers and watched the evening news. They were armed with righteous opinions and music that backed them up. Politicians in Washington had to respect that. Eventually, that cultural movement ended a war.