True confession: I was about to commit blasphemy by writing something cynical about the 50th anniversary of 1969’s Woodstock Music and Art Fair, that beloved, holy mecca of social protest.

Frustration and disappointment were getting the better of me because Woodstock was the result of an angry decade, and yet, despite those glorified “three days of peace and music,” the world is still angry.

The children, and now the grandchildren, of Woodstock have become angry, sociopathic mass shooters. Politics and the media have not advanced one peaceful iota. Any lessons from the Woodstock love fest seem lost in mean discourse and a hail of bullets.

I pulled Abbie Hoffman’s 1969 “Woodstock Nation” off my shelf, only to read: “Were we pilgrims or lemmings? Was this really the beginning of a new civilization or the symptom of a dying one?”

Adding to my pessimism, a recent Day guest editorial about Woodstock said “Yet even at the time there was a sense that Woodstock was the end of something rather than a beginning.”

Subsequent Woodstocks in ‘94 and ‘99 ended angrily, indicating Woodstock ‘69 was a one-and-done.

So why are we still worshipping a “happening” that failed?

I was wrestling to find the positive when my Waterford neighbor handed me his original copy of the Times Herald-Record, from Middletown, New York, dated Saturday, Aug. 16, 1969.

The old newspaper was full of the kindness of locals who responded to the crisis-level needs of 450,000 hippies who overwhelmed their towns, unexpected and unprepared.

All roads were blocked for 20 miles, supply lines cut off.

Like an old vinyl record, there were two sides to Woodstock: the “B” side was the physical mess and emergency support needs created by the throng. But the “A” side was the utopian scene of love among perfect strangers with shared values and dreams.

I was 15 years old in 1969, old enough to recall the magic. There was something in the air then. You could feel it.

The Herald-Record began lifting my spirits. Then, in August, I drove to the Woodstock Museum at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts in Bethel, N.Y., where the spell of Woodstock is still alive.

The museum put me back in touch with the immense spirituality of the moment.

American youth had succeeded in creating a peaceful counterculture to political and generational oppression, and government violence at home and abroad. It was extraordinary human theater, a message to the world.

Author Elliott Landy wrote: “Woodstock became a symbol to the world of a better way of life — of freedom, of love, of spiritual union between many. There was hope.” Many called it a state of “being.”

Martin Luther King’s words adorned one museum wall: “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish as fools.”

With those words in my head, I stood at the granite marker on the edge of Max Yasgur’s pasture in Bethel. A nearby picture showed the dense, endless mass of pilgrims in 1969. At the bottom of the hill was the level earth where the stage had been.

Looking up the hill, imagining that enormous new, peaceful society brought it all home for me. There’s still magic in the air on that long, sloping pasture, with its huge peace sign now carved in the grass.

Woodstock didn’t fail; it left a valuable legacy of hope. Half a million young people lived together in peace for three days, in punishing conditions, proving to a violent world it was possible.

Woodstock is a state of mind, a place we can, and should, all choose to “be.”

John Steward lives in Waterford and can be reached at tossinglines@gmail.com. For more, visit tossinglines.com.