Excerpt from Bill Ayers - What A Long Strange Trips It Has Been
Whew! What was all that mess? I’m still in a daze, sorting it all out, decompressing.
For the past few years, I have gone about my business, hanging out with my kids and, now, my grandchildren, taking care of our elders (they moved in as the kids moved out), going to work, teaching and writing. And every day, I participate in the never-ending effort to build a powerful and irresistible movement for peace and social justice.
In years past, I would now and then – and often unpredictably – appear in the newspapers or on TV, sometimes with a reference to Fugitive Days, my 2001 memoir of the exhilarating and difficult years of resistance against the American war in Vietnam.
Then came this political season.
During the primaries, the blogosphere was full of chatter about my relationship with Barack Obama.
We had served together on the board of the Woods Foundation and knew one another as neighbours in Chicago’s Hyde Park. In 1996, at a coffee gathering that my wife, Bernardine Dohrn (also a founder of the Weatherman) and I held for him, I made a $200 donation to his campaign for the Illinois state senate.
Obama’s rivals and enemies thought they saw an opportunity to deepen a dishonest perception that he is somehow un-American, alien, linked to radical ideas, a closet terrorist who sympathizes with extremism – and they pounced.
On March 13, Senator John McCain, apparently in an attempt to reassure the “base,” sat down for an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News. McCain was not yet aware of the narrative Hannity had been spinning for months, and so Hannity filled him in: Ayers is an unrepentant “terrorist,” he explained.
“On 9/11, of all days, he had an article where he bragged about bombing our Pentagon, bombing the Capitol and bombing New York City police headquarters. … He said, `I regret not doing more.’”
McCain couldn’t believe it.
Neither could I.
On the campaign trail, McCain immediately got on message. I became a prop, a cartoon character created to be pummelled.
When Alaska Governor Sarah Palin got hold of it, the attack went viral. At a now-famous Oct. 4 rally, she said Obama was “pallin’ around with terrorists.” (I pictured us sharing a milkshake with two straws.)
The crowd began chanting, “Kill him! Kill him!” It was downhill from there.
My voicemail filled up with hate messages. They were mostly from men, all venting and breathing heavily. A few threats: “Watch out!” and “You deserve to be shot.” And I got some emails like this one from satan@hell.com: “I’m coming to get you and when I do, I’ll waterboard you.”
The police lieutenant who came to copy down those threats deadpanned that he hoped the guy who was going to shoot me got there before the guy who was going to waterboard me, since it would be most foul to be tortured and then shot.
… In a robust and sophisticated democracy, political leaders – and all of us – ought to seek ways to talk with many people who hold dissenting, or even radical, ideas. Lacking that simple and yet essential capacity to question authority, we might still be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings today.
Maybe we could welcome our current situation – torn by another illegal war, as it was in the ’60s – as an opportunity to search for the new.
Perhaps we might think of ourselves not as passive consumers of politics, but as fully mobilized political actors.
Perhaps we might think of our various efforts now, as we did then, as more than a single campaign, but rather as our movement-in-the-making.
We might find hope in the growth of opposition to war and occupation worldwide.
Or we might be inspired by the growing movements for reparations and prison abolition, or the rising immigrant rights movement and the stirrings of working people everywhere, or by gay and lesbian and transgender people courageously pressing for full recognition.
…. We may not be able to will a movement into being, but neither can we sit idly for a movement to spring full-grown, as from the head of Zeus.
We have to agitate for democracy and egalitarianism, press harder for human rights, learn to build a new society through our self-transformations and our limited everyday struggles.
At the turn of the last century, Eugene Debs, the great Socialist Party leader from Terre Haute, Ind., told a group of workers in Chicago, “If I could lead you into the Promised Land, I would not do it, because someone else would come along and lead you out.”
Nice rebuttal Bill. Still unrepentant. Not a word of his killings.
Makes you kind of feel sorry for all the hardship he’s been through…
photo credit: Barack Obama
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