Word: bethell
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More important, Bethel demonstrated the unique sense of community that seems to exist among the young, their mystical feeling for themselves as a special group, an "us" in contrast to a "them." The festival was widely advertised, but the unexpectedly large crowd it attracted suggests that the potential significance of the event was spread by a kind of underground network. "If you were part of this culture," said one pilgrim back from Bethel, "you had to be there." In spite of the grownup suspicions and fears about the event. Bethel produced a feeling of friendship, camaraderie and ?an overused...
Youth's sense of community is an ad hoc thing: it is suspicious of institutions and wary of organization, prizing freedom above system. In this, as in many other ways, the youth of Bethel displayed adherence to the prevailing spirit of the hippie movement. It is true enough that the manifestation of flower power in Haight-Ashbury and the East Village became a bad scene of gang rapes, deaths from malnutrition and too much speed. It is equally true that most of those at Bethel were not hippies in the commonly accepted sense: a good half of them, at least...
...explicitly, is basically moral; it is the proclamation of a new set of values as much as it is the rejection of an old system. The values, moreover, are not merely confined to the pleasures of tumescence. The same kind of people who basked in the spirit of Bethel also stormed the deans' offices at Harvard and Columbia and shed tears or blood at Chicago last summer?all in the name of a new morality...
...idealism of the young. The knight-errant campaign of Eugene McCarthy was, his enemies said, something of a Children's Crusade. Bobby Kennedy, like his brother Jack, was also able to speak to the Now Generation in language that it heard and heeded. Clearly, the passions of the Bethel people are there to be exploited, for good or ill. It is an open question whether some as yet unknown politician could exploit the deep emotions of today's youth to build a politics of ecstasy...
...rock festival has become, in a way, the equivalent of a political forum for the young. The politics involved is not the expression of opinion or ideas but the spirit of community created?the good vibrations or the bad ones, the young in touch with themselves and aware. If Bethel is any proof, this kind of expressive happening will become even more important. "This was only the beginning," warns Jimi Hendrix. "The only way for kids to make the older generation understand is through mass gatherings like Bethel. And the kids are not going...