Woodstock was a statement on nation's direction

It was neither a rally nor a protest.

But Woodstock was, in the most basic sense, a demonstration.
The festival stood in opposition to years of American violence: the police brutality of the Southern civil rights marches, the assassinations of two Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr., the urban race riots and the bloody chaos of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Hovering over it all was the muddled, maddening Vietnam War, whose escalating body count punctated the evening newscasts.

And while Woodstock was not an overtly political event, the implications of several hundred thousand young people gathering peacefully were hard to ignore. At a time when the country seemed to be falling apart, Woodstock offered a rare vision of unity, cohesion and solidarity.

"The way I looked at it, the event was something that was going to change everything," says Bill Frohlich, a 60-year-old executive manager at Nassau BOCES who attended the festival. "We were exhibiting, if you will, the way that we wanted to live and the way that we wanted to conduct our lives, which was in complete opposition to what we saw going on in the world at the time. This was a way to come together and represent that to the culture."

That was the aerial view. On the ground, the crowd looked more like a mosaic. There were politically engaged students and anti-societal dropouts, agrarian communists and urban bohemians, soldiers and pacifists.

The galvanizing issue of the day, however, was Vietnam. And with thousands of Americans dying there each year, anti-war sentiment wasn't limited to longhairs and radicals. Paul Dallara, 60, never considered himself a hippie, but by the time he attended Woodstock he was on his way to becoming a conscientious objector to avoid the draft. "My father was a World War II veteran and he supported me," says Dallara, an assistant principal at Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School. "He didn't want to see me fight."

At Woodstock, artists denounced the war from the stage. Joan Baez talked of her husband David Harris' imprisonment for resisting the draft. Country Joe and the Fish sang their rollicking protest song "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag." And there was no mistaking the anguish in Jimi Hendrix's wordless, eloquent version of "The Star-Spangled Banner."

"If somebody had a political agenda and they translated it into their music, I didn't have a problem with that," says Jim DeCesare, a 59-year-old musician in Bay Shore. "Now it's just, 'Stick to the music, don't be opinionated.' "

Vietnam dragged on until 1975, by which time more than 58,000 U.S. troops had perished. And on the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, America now finds itself mired in two unpopular wars. But to say that Woodstock failed to achieve its goal is to miss the point. The festival was the goal.

"People acting out peace and love, acting out the opposite of war, acting out the way they wanted to see the world - is that protesting?" says Frohlich. "Is that political? Yeah, I guess it is."