There’s a lot to complain about when examining my generation of Americans. We’re lazy, we’re commercialized, we’re ignorant, and we’re just plain stupid.

Usually these accusations come as a result of various events, strung together to portray a mosaic of lethargy and shiftlessness.

Over the weekend, all things wrong with youth were acted out in one four-day stretch in Rome, N.Y., at Woodstock ’99.

The premise of Woodstock ’99 was the top of it all. How any visitor to the festival could stomach all of the promotions is beyond me. The logo of the dove sitting on the guitar was enough to make me vomit.

To pretend that Woodstock ’99 was about anything but crass consumerism is laughable. Was it peace or love that organizers had in mind when they offered the festival on pay-per-view?

If I had been in New York last weekend, I would have jumped at going because I liked a lot of the bands.

The event drew nearly a quarter million people, which would have increased my chances with the lady folk.

Surely some young mud-covered lass in the crowd would have been in to the short, scruffy journalist type.

I wouldn’t have gone for the reasons that most of my dolt-headed peers went. I don’t know how many times some frat-boy look-a-like lacking a shirt was on camera announcing to the world that he was going to tell his grandchildren that he was at Woodstock ’99.

Was it a decent concert? Yes. Will it be necessary to tell your grandson Jimmy about it? No.

That would be like telling your grandchildren about that rad concert you saw at the Mark in the QC with Bad Company, Ted Nugent, the Doobie Brothers and Lynard Skynard. Sure, you had a good time, but I don’t think you’re going to care all that much when you’re 85.

Other than the pretentiousness, we displayed our collective idiocy in several ways.

How about that guy that got arrested for selling $16,000 worth of psychedelic mushrooms in the nearby campgrounds? How whack is that?

At the original Woodstock they were talking about the brown acid on stage, and you still didn’t hear of anyone getting arrested.

You’ve got to be one bad dealer to get busted in a crowd of 225,000 people. Even our drug dealers can’t compete with the originals.

Clearly the biggest example of everything that is wrong with my generation was the behavior of the crowd.

It is one thing to throw bottles at the stage during Limp Bizkit’s set on Saturday night. That seems like a normal reaction to music that’s centered on and built around rage and anger toward everything and everyone.

There was no rational explanation, though, for the fiery end to the celebration on Sunday night and Monday morning.

In case you haven’t heard, Woodstock ’99 ended in numerous bonfires that ended up engulfing the main stage and causing the injury of five concert-goers and the arrest of seven people.

James McMahon, New York state police superintendent, estimated that 200 to 500 youths took an active part in the rioting, while more than thousands watched and cheered. People, get a clue.

According to CNN, concert promoter John Scher said he was shocked and dismayed by the anarchy that marked the close of the festival. Scher said he blamed a “minority” of “bad” concert-goers.

“What happened here,” he said, “was an aberration, not only in a general sense but with what happened here this weekend. There will be an evaluation of why it happened.”

I’ll cut that evaluation short. The reason it happened is because my generation has no concept of where to channel its angst. The fact that only a handful of people were involved means nothing. This wasn’t a freak occurrence, an unrepresentative sample of the young population. This is the kind of thing that has come to be expected from us on a regular basis.

To a lesser extent, the same thing happened when Iowa State students rioted here in Ames .

We’re disconnected from society and from what’s going on in our world, but we still carry that feeling of rebellion that any healthy youth in his early 20s carries. The result is stupid, pointless violence.

So what’s a brother to do? The world is no longer about peace and love, and we’re too unmotivated to rally around a new cause.

I wish I had the answer. But at last, in my final column for the Daily, I am willing to admit that I don’t. I don’t have the answer, but then again neither does anyone else. All I can ask anyone to do is stop and think about where you are and who you are. Beyond that, you’re on your own.

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David Roepke is a junior is journalism and mass communications from Aurora. He is head news editor of the Daily.