A Quote by Johnny Rivers
Even Woodstock turned out to be a disaster. Everybody was stuck in the mud and people got sick.
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I was at Woodstock. In the mud.
At most corporations if you make an acquisition and it turns out to be a disaster, all the paperwork and presentations that caused the dumb acquisition to be made are quickly forgotten. You've got denial, you've got everything in the world. You've got Pavlovian association tendency. Nobody even wants to even be associated with the damned thing or even mention it. At Johnson & Johnson, they make everybody revisit their old acquisitions and wade through the presentations. That is a very smart thing to do. And by the way, I do the same thing routinely.
When I was about 14 or 15, and running in a pretty muddy cross country race, one of my shoes stuck in the mud and came off. Boy, was I wild. To think that I had trained hard for this race and didn't do up my shoelace tightly enough! I really got aggressive with myself, and I found myself starting to pass a lot of runners. As it turned out, I improved something like twenty places in that one race. But I never did get my shoe back.
I don't care what you do, I just don't want to be a mud hippie like you. [From 1994 woodstock]
A Mudboy is just somebody who came from nothing: you know, who turned nothing into something. You know, when I was in Africa, in the rain, I walk around in, like, mud, you know, the sand would turn to mud, and you are not getting out of that.
When they got here, when they successfully emigrated - and not everybody that came through Ellis Island was accepted. If you were sick you were not allowed in. If you had any kind of a disease, we were in the process of trying to wipe out all these diseases. We did that by keeping people who had them out of the country. You might look at it today as, "Wow, that was really mean." No. It was putting America first. It was putting the American people first, and it was a realization that we can't take everybody.
I grew up with the Woodstock generation. I went to Woodstock, and like everybody in my school, I wanted to be in a rock-and-roll band, and most of us were. But I also grew up with a lot of piano lessons and a lot of classical music training.
Equal pay, paid leave, paid sick days, workplace flexibility, and affordable childcare - everywhere I go around the United States, as I talk to working families, these are the issues they raise... We have over 43 million Americans who don't have a single day of sick leave, but everybody gets sick. Everybody's children get sick.
This isn't the Democratic party of our fathers and grandfathers. This is the party of Woodstock hippies. I was at Woodstock--I built the stage. And when everything fell apart, and people were fighting for peanut butter sandwiches, it was the National Guard who came in and saved the same people who were protesting them. So when Hillary Clinton a few years ago wanted to build a Woodstock memorial, I said it should be a statue of a National Guardsman feeding a crying hippie.
We like to joke that India has sick companies but rich promoters. Yet, even after the bad loans and non-payment of dues have turned at least three banks sick, there is no public demand for investigation, accountability and punishment.
With money come the tests. My bankruptcy, which at the time I thought was a disaster, turned out to be a major blessing. It taught me so much! Money is not only an isolator, but it's a magnet, too. It draws all kinds of people to you - you may not want them but it draws them to you anyway. The reverse of that, a bankruptcy, sends everybody away.
Over the years Woodstock got glorified and romanticised and became the event that symbolised Utopia. It's the last page of our collective memory of the age of innocence. Then things turned ugly and would never be the same again.
I remember my first friend who got sick. It was 1981, and the disease was called the gay cancer. I don't think the word 'AIDS' came out until '84. I just remember it being terrifying as more people got sick. We didn't know how you could catch it, you heard all kinds of crazy things.
Though it's frequently portrayed as this crazy, unbridled festival of rain-soaked, stoned hippies dancing in the mud, Woodstock was obviously much more than that - or we wouldn't still be talking about it in 2009. People of all ages and colors came together in the fields of Max Yasgur's farm.
I was living in Woodstock for a long time, and I thought, I got to get out of here, man.
Dread of disaster makes everybody act in the very way that increases the disaster. Psychologically the situation is analogous to that of people trampled to death when there is a panic in a theatre caused by a cry of `Fire!'.
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