Word: spirit
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...preaches, implicitly or 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...
...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...
Psychoanalyst Rollo May describes Bethel as "a symptomatic event of our time that showed the tremendous hunger, need and yearning for community on the part of youth." He compares its friendly spirit favorably with the alcoholic mischief ever present at a Shriners' convention but wonders how long the era of good feeling will last. Other observers wonder about future superfestivals, if they become tourist spectaculars for adult hangers-on. The Hashbury began to die when the bus-driven voyeurs came by and the hard-drug addicts took over...
...determined to make it big as a popular singer any way she can. She succeeds. What is more extraordinary, so does Renek, somehow using a sentimental and unpromising plot to explore the nature of power, the exploitation of sex and some of the redeeming qualities of the human spirit...