"I came across a child of God; he was walking along the road. I asked him 'where are you going?' This he told me. Said 'I'm going down to Yasgur's farm, gonna join in a rock n' roll band. Gonna get back to the land, set my soul free.' We are stardust; we are golden; we are caught in the Devil's bargain. And we've got to get ourselves back to the Garden."

Woodstock, Joni Mitchell.

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It wasn't supposed to happen this way. Promoters billed Woodstock '99 as "three days of peace, love, and music," just like the original in 1969. But they should have known that things were different when Fred Durst, lead singer for Limp Bizkit, told the crowd "This is 1999 ... Stick those Birkenstocks up your [expletive]." As the Washington Post put it, Durst's declaration "best summed [up] the spirit of Woodstock '99."

Things went downhill from there. On Sunday night, during a set by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Woodstock '99 turned into an orgy of burning, looting and vandalism. Several hundred people rushed a fence intended to keep gate-crashers out. When the police tried to restrain them, they fought back, throwing rocks and bottles at the cops. And that was just the beginning. They knocked down a light tower, looted and burned vendors' booths, and ATM machines, and set fire to nearby trailers.

When it seemed things couldn't get worse, they did. According to the Post, Oneida County, N.Y., officials are investigating reports of rapes committed during the festival. During a set by Korn, women who had been body-surfing above the crowd were forcibly pulled into the mosh pit and gang-raped. Witnesses said they saw this happen to at least five women.

The events of July 23-25 left the organizers shaken. John Scher, the promoter and organizer of Woodstock '99, told reporters that he was "bummed big time." He told them that "I don't know if we'll ever know why these kids did this. I really don't think there was a kid out there that wanted there to be mass destruction." I'm sorry, but the evidence contradicts Scher on both counts. There clearly were people who wanted mass destruction, and it's not that hard to understand why "three days of peace, love and music" would end in violence. And this may be especially hard for boomers like Scher (and myself) to understand, but the seeds for what happened in Rome, N.Y., were planted 30 years ago about 200 miles to the south: The original Woodstock.

Myth and Reality

Of course, any connection between the original Woodstock and the violence at Woodstock '99 directly contradicts what is possibly the most deeply held conviction of my generation: the Myth of Woodstock. Joni Mitchell's 1970 musical homage to the original "three days of peace, love and music" pretty much spells out what Boomers believe about what happened in August, 1969. Boomers believe that America, and perhaps the world, changed on those three rainy days on Max Yasgur's farm. At the very least, it marked the definitive triumph of America's youth culture. From August 1969 onward, what would matter in America is what young people, and not their elders, thought. Others went even further and, as in Mitchell's song, saw Woodstock as the creation of a nation of sorts. (I'll get to what kind of nation shortly.) There was no shortage of interpretations about what it all meant æ which prompted NBC news anchor Sander Vanocur to call Woodstock "possibly the most over-interpreted event in American history."

It was these interpretations, more than what actually happened in Bethel, N.Y., that caused the "three days of peace, love, and music" to assume its mythic stature among baby boomers. Somehow, my peers have convinced themselves that Woodstock represented our generation at its best. And many of them consider what happened at Woodstock '99 to be a betrayal of "the spirit of Woodstock," and proof of the Boomers' superiority. You get a sense of these attitudes in an op-ed piece written by Gene Weingarten, a Washington Post staff writer and veteran of the original Woodstock. He wrote that what happened in Rome was "payback" for all the times today's 18-year-olds call his generation "old." Weingarten was beside himself with glee at what he views as an entire generation's humiliation. And, as a parting salvo he writes "Okay, kids. Read my lips: My generation may be old and slow. But we're not lame."

Please! First of all, an entire generation wasn't at Woodstock '99, and many who were there were well-behaved. But, more importantly, we need to move beyond what one person calls the Boomers' "hazy cloud of 1960s nostalgia" and examine the beliefs that came of age in 1960s, and which were on full display in Bethel 30 years ago. (Contrary to what you may have heard, the original festival didn't take place in Woodstock. It took place in a small farming community named Bethel, New York.) These beliefs, or worldview, led directly to what happened at Woodstock '99.

This worldview saw Western Civilization, the world that they inherited from their parents, as corrupt. Now it's true that world (like all human history) had real injustices. Blacks and other minorities didn't enjoy the full benefits of citizenship. They weren't free to live where they wanted, eat where they wanted, or even marry whom they wanted. (For instance, it was illegal in Virginia for blacks and whites to marry each other until 1967.) Likewise, the world women lived in was unduly constricted. The best an intelligent woman could hope for was to become a teacher.

This all changed by the '70s and '80s. But instead of seeing discrimination and other societal ills as a failure to live up to our ideals, many boomers saw it as proof that the old moral order was beyond correction. It needed to be replaced if we were to ever recover our purity and innocence. The old moral order, which included Christianity, was the "devil's bargain" of Mitchell's song. Borrowing a page — heck, the whole book — from French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Woodstock generation concluded that it was institutions such as the church, the government and the family that had led us astray. (Our own sinfulness, of course, had nothing to do with it.) If we ever were to find our way "back to the Garden," we would have to free ourselves from the constraints imposed by these institutions.

This belief is graphically displayed in the 1970 film Woodstock. If you have ever seen the film, one of the things that stands out is how many people are standing around naked. It's as if by shedding their clothes they're shedding everything that stands between them and freedom. Now, not every boomer embraced this worldview. But this distrust of the world we had inherited — with its belief in things like moral absolutes, delaying gratification and the importance of self-control — was something most of us internalized. We conveniently convinced ourselves that our parents had "repressed" us, and, in the process, screwed up the world.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Fast forward to 1999. The Woodstock generation has become parents. They're almost afraid to speak of moral absolutes to their kids for fear of "repressing them" them — not to mention seeming hypocritical. They've decided to let their kids choose their beliefs for themselves, even though the kids have no basis upon which to choose these beliefs. Talking about sexual morals is difficult, if not out of the question. Not only because the "free love" generation feels a tad sheepish, but also because they don't know how to answer when their kids ask "why is it wrong to have sex ... outside marriage ... with someone you barely know ... with someone who isn't sure she wants to have sex with you?" In other words, they've discovered what their parents meant when they said "wait until you have kids of your own!"

Now, I'm not blaming everything bad that happened at Woodstock '99 on the failings of my generation. Nor am I absolving the people who turned the festival into a mockery of the ideals embodied in the motto "three days of peace, love and music." I am saying that ideas have consequences — to quote the title of a famous book — and what happened at Woodstock '99 validates this.

Take Rousseau's belief in the innate goodness of human nature. If there's one thing that history has taught us, it's that the anonymity of a crowd tends to bring out the worst in us. Take the L.A. riots of 1992. A truck driver named Reginald Denny was nearly beaten to death by a mob. At their trial, his alleged assailants claimed that they were caught up in the mob's desire for violence. While the jury, thankfully, didn't buy the defense, it still resonated with many people. That's because we know that we're all capable of doing something as part of a crowd that we would never dream of doing on our own. There are exceptions: if the crowd gathers for an explicitly moral purpose. For instance, anti-communist protesters in East Germany, or in Prague back in 1989, were noteworthy for their peacefulness. That's because what drew them together was a shared moral commitment: the overthrow of totalitarianism. Call me judgmental, but having a good time doesn't quite rise to that level. Is it any wonder that the anonymity provided by a crowd of 200,000 at Woodstock '99 brought out the worst in some people?

Or take the stories of rape. Is it that outrageous to suggest that the causal attitudes towards sex, best exemplified by the phenomenon known as "hooking up," have bred a sort of entitlement mentality towards sex among some young men? Again, I'm not excusing what happened. I'm saying that we shouldn't be surprised. Sean Piccoli, who covers the South Florida music scene for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, says that he has witnessed sexual assaults similar to what happened in Rome at music festivals in Florida. Girls throw themselves in the mosh pit, and emerge looking "absolutely ashen-faced and humiliated."

I could go on, but you get the point. The miscreants at Woodstock '99 were acting the way you might expect kids to act when adults haven't taken the time to teach them clear notions of right and wrong. So, before my generation wonders where our kids went wrong, we need to ask ourselves "how did this happen?" If we're honest with ourselves, we'll realize that, when it was our turn to rage against the machine, we jettisoned the kind of beliefs and values that keep our worst impulses in check. We'll realize that we have, indeed, taught our children well. The problem is: the lesson was the wrong one.