Ayers Op-Ed

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Ayers Op-Ed
183
Sun, 12-07-2008 - 4:53am

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Real Bill Ayers

By WILLIAM AYERS
Published: December 5, 2008
Chicago

IN the recently concluded presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama. I refused, and here’s why.

Unable to challenge the content of Barack Obama’s campaign, his opponents invented a narrative about a young politician who emerged from nowhere, a man of charm, intelligence and skill, but with an exotic background and a strange name. The refrain was a question: “What do we really know about this man?”

Secondary characters in the narrative included an African-American preacher with a fiery style, a Palestinian scholar and an “unrepentant domestic terrorist.” Linking the candidate with these supposedly shadowy characters, and ferreting out every imagined secret tie and dark affiliation, became big news.

I was cast in the “unrepentant terrorist” role; I felt at times like the enemy projected onto a large screen in the “Two Minutes Hate” scene from George Orwell’s “1984,” when the faithful gathered in a frenzy of fear and loathing.

With the mainstream news media and the blogosphere caught in the pre-election excitement, I saw no viable path to a rational discussion. Rather than step clumsily into the sound-bite culture, I turned away whenever the microphones were thrust into my face. I sat it out.

Now that the election is over, I want to say as plainly as I can that the character invented to serve this drama wasn’t me, not even close. Here are the facts:

I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices — the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious — as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.

The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be — and still is being — debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war.

Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.

I cannot imagine engaging in actions of that kind today. And for the past 40 years, I’ve been teaching and writing about the unique value and potential of every human life, and the need to realize that potential through education.

I have regrets, of course — including mistakes of excess and failures of imagination, posturing and posing, inflated and heated rhetoric, blind sectarianism and a lot else. No one can reach my age with their eyes even partly open and not have hundreds of regrets. The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long.

The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.

We — the broad “we” — wrote letters, marched, talked to young men at induction centers, surrounded the Pentagon and lay down in front of troop trains. Yet we were inadequate to end the killing of three million Vietnamese and almost 60,000 Americans during a 10-year war.

The dishonesty of the narrative about Mr. Obama during the campaign went a step further with its assumption that if you can place two people in the same room at the same time, or if you can show that they held a conversation, shared a cup of coffee, took the bus downtown together or had any of a thousand other associations, then you have demonstrated that they share ideas, policies, outlook, influences and, especially, responsibility for each other’s behavior. There is a long and sad history of guilt by association in our political culture, and at crucial times we’ve been unable to rise above it.

President-elect Obama and I sat on a board together; we lived in the same diverse and yet close-knit community; we sometimes passed in the bookstore. We didn’t pal around, and I had nothing to do with his positions. I knew him as well as thousands of others did, and like millions of others, I wish I knew him better.

Demonization, guilt by association, and the politics of fear did not triumph, not this time. Let’s hope they never will again. And let’s hope we might now assert that in our wildly diverse society, talking and listening to the widest range of people is not a sin, but a virtue.

William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of “Fugitive Days” and a co-author of the forthcoming “Race Course.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/06/opinion/06ayers.html?_r=1&em

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iVillage Member
Registered: 04-24-2008
In reply to: sild
Tue, 12-09-2008 - 3:35pm
Yes, they knew better than to try to overthrow a man who had ruled for 3 decades with an Iron Fist.
iVillage Member
Registered: 04-24-2008
In reply to: sild
Tue, 12-09-2008 - 3:41pm

They could speak freely.

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-30-2008
In reply to: sild
Tue, 12-09-2008 - 3:47pm

But Toots-

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-25-2007
In reply to: sild
Tue, 12-09-2008 - 3:55pm
<<< If the US government had honored the committements that it undertook the the South, the boat people and the re-education camps (to say nothing of the Khmer Rouge next door) wouldn't have happened.

Not true. The Khmer Rouge arose in the power vacuum that reulted in the US sponsored coup against Prince Sihanouk.>>>


And...let's not forget that it was communist Vietnam that rode to the rescue in deposing Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge:


Sopal

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iVillage Member
Registered: 11-21-2008
In reply to: sild
Tue, 12-09-2008 - 4:04pm
Well I suppose it is easy for you to sit in your overstuffed chair and tell others that life was so much better living under tyrannical rule...


Edited 12/9/2008 4:08 pm ET by chillychilychilly
iVillage Member
Registered: 11-21-2008
In reply to: sild
Tue, 12-09-2008 - 4:07pm

They absolutely could NOT speak freely.

Too bad you weren't around to advise President Bush in his hour of need. The Democrat leaders seem to have led him down the wrong path...




Edited 12/9/2008 4:18 pm ET by chillychilychilly
iVillage Member
Registered: 04-24-2008
In reply to: sild
Tue, 12-09-2008 - 4:12pm

<<"You aren't using your land as effectively as I could if I lived there, so

iVillage Member
Registered: 11-21-2008
In reply to: sild
Tue, 12-09-2008 - 4:14pm
And no, they could not speak freely. I have a friend from Iraq. They had to watch very carefully what they said and did and could not appear suspicious in any way. They couldn't even disagree with the smallest thing without great fear. YOu do not know what you are talking about.
iVillage Member
Registered: 04-24-2008
In reply to: sild
Tue, 12-09-2008 - 4:25pm
Good riddance to the cowboy.
iVillage Member
Registered: 04-24-2008
In reply to: sild
Tue, 12-09-2008 - 4:26pm

<>


ITA.

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