Bill Ayers: What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

[marmar]

from In These Times:



Features > November 7, 2008
What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been
Looking back on a surreal campaign season
By Bill Ayers



Whew! What was all that mess? I’m still in a daze, sorting it all out, decompressing.

Pass the Vitamin C.

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—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. It was a time when the world was in flames, revolution was in the air, and the serial assassinations of black leaders disrupted our utopian dreams.

These media episodes of fleeting notoriety always led to some extravagant and fantastic assertions about what I did, what I might have said and what I probably believe now.

It was always a bit surreal. Then came this political season.

During the primary, the blogosphere was full of chatter about my relationship with President-elect Barack Obama. We had served together on the board of the Woods Foundation and knew one another as neighbors in Chicago’s Hyde Park. In 1996, at a coffee gathering that my wife, Bernardine Dohrn, and I held for him, I made a donation to his campaign for the Illinois State Senate.

Obama’s political 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. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4028/what_a_long_strange_trip_its_been

[Fluffdaddy]

1. Nice to finally read his point of view. Also Nice he waited til after the big day

[G_j]

2. K&R, enlightening reading!

I highly recommend it!

[Earth_First]

3. "Pass the Vitamin C."

HA!

[mascarax]

4. I commend him for staying out of the attacks

Not speaking up was best.
I'm glad he's talking now.

[mopinko]

5. a good man.

i met him once, and have heard him speak. he is a chicagoan, something that the world is about to find out a lot more about. it will be good for you.

[CreekDog]

6. I just read that

oh shoot, am i a terrorist now? :hide:
:sarcasm:

[old mark]

7. Certainly a better American than anyone in the republican Party. nt

[John Q. Citizen]

8. I like this part

"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."