When the original Woodstock sprang up 40 years ago, my own off-the-wall adventure was taking place in Pittsburgh as I attempted to be a reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

It was an uphill battle. I was a clueless young man taking a crash course in actual work.

I wasn’t even aware that Woodstock was taking place in upstate New York. I was more concerned with Vietnam and being in the middle of a vast social upheaval that had little to do with a muddy field in Bethel, N.Y., and a lot to do with the exploding of cultural, economic and political land mines laid in the 1950s.

My Pittsburgh-centric window on that upheaval was watching steel barons preside over the self-destruction of the American steel industry because they were too smug to adopt new technology and to compete globally.

Social upheaval in the 1960s and ‘70s had nothing to do with bare-breasted stoners at a rock concert. That season of discontent was another eruption of America’s ongoing class warfare, in which the wealthy relentlessly game the system, defeat opposing movements such as labor unions and civil rights, shower money on politicians, accumulate more assets than they need and guarantee that their cadre remains small and impregnable.

In this particular version of class warfare, the haves shine a spotlight of scorn on happenings like Woodstock, so that have-nots will resent their own children while haves make off with the loot. Blame discontent on rock music and wanton youth, they said, while the self-serving lay seeds for actual disparity and actual despair.

Let’s get real here, shall we?

It wasn’t Jimi Hendrix who mismanaged postwar industrial prosperity into rust. It wasn’t Janis Joplin who created a financial industry that routinely causes recessions.

It wasn’t public nudity that produced real estate bubbles and predatory lending. Nor was it dope that mired the seething majority in declining real income and took away the promise of steady employment.

It wasn’t long hair that started mainline churches on a long slide into nonviability. It wasn’t “flower power” that morphed America’s finest colleges into a ticket to wealth, rather than an incubator for invention and wisdom.

Youths are always a convenient target. The real action takes place elsewhere: in political caucuses that divide up government largess and in executive suites where the normal risk-and-reward calculus gets untethered from accountability.

In this latest anger season in U.S. politics, cynical forces are again fanning fires of confusion and loss into wildfires of rage against the wrong targets. Such diversionary tactics trace to Reconstruction and the rise of the Klan, or xenophobic anti-immigration riots, or McCarthyism, or religious extremism.

Will we fall for it one more time? Or will we, this time, stop shouting, ignore those who are trying to make us angry, and look clear-eyed at broken systems that need our best efforts to get fixed?