Woodstock Revisited: An End to Stigma and a Call to Compassion

  Forty-nine years ago on a weekend not much different from this weekend, half a million young people gathered on a farm in upstate New York to celebrate peace and music at a festival that will forever be known as Woodstock. 

 Though history seems to want to paint the festival as a hippie weekend of drugs and music, for those of us who were lucky enough to be there, it was something more than this. When the car we were in overheated and the NY state thruway closed down, a friend and I joined hundreds of others who walked to the festival with nothing more than a blanket slung over our shoulder, a bag of odds and ends, a few dollars in our pockets and the clothes on our back. It wasn't long before the whole area was declared a disaster area. Everything was in short supply. Between sets of music, over the loudspeaker would come these words: "We're in this together. Watch out for one another. Take care of your neighbor." And so we did. We shared food, we shared blankets, we shared water and stories. When the relief helicopters began to rain boxes of Campbell soup and rations in the field, we shared them too. Houses along the way set up tables with plastic cups of water for passers-by. There was a spirit of compassion.

 Call the situation today what you will..an epidemic, a crisis, a dilemma. I look at the recent statistics on fatal overdoses, users and family members impacted by addiction and I call it a disaster. Most disasters elicit compassion. This one? I'm not too sure. 

 As in Woodstock, I wish there were a loudspeaker in every city and town in the country blaring out: "We're in this together. Watch out for each other. Take care of your neighbor." Your neighbor is no longer the guy or girl with long hair and a faded tie-dye t-shirt. It is the little girl who goes into foster care because there is no one else to watch over her, the grandmother who comes out of retirement to raise a second generation of children, the young man who lives under your local bridge because he's burnt all other bridges in his life, the parents who are mourning the loss of their only child, the parents who are scrambling to find help for their child, the young girl who is released from jail with nowhere to go, the young man hesitantly calling a helpline hoping that this will be beginning of a fresh start.

 Why do so many rise up to help when there is a fire, a flood, a hurricane and yet remain complacent while 72,000 are dying from fatal overdoses? Perhaps the question may be answered in one word: stigma. It clogs the natural flow of compassion to those in need. 

 How I wish as a nation we could unclog our thinking patterns and treat addiction as we would treat any other disease, calamity, disaster or misfortune--with a genuine outflow of compassion and a commitment to take care of our neighbor.

Peace.