I was born in the same year as your wife , and graduated from in college in the 60s. At the time, my college boyfriend wore a black armband to protest the war; even that small show of protest embarrassed me when we were out in public.

Today, I am married to Tom, a sedentary man who sits in a lounge chair from which he holds forth, safely grumbling about the war in Iraq and the current government’s outrageous and illegal machinations. If Americans in greater numbers had actually gotten up off their Barcaloungers, turned off their re-runs and protested this war, things might have turned out very differently. Even unresponsive governments notice when large numbers turn to critical mass.

This government has sanctioned unbelieveably-undermcratic activities including wiretapping of its own citizens, torture of prisoners, and the criminally-unbalanced favoring of billionaires to the near destruction of our middle class. We are scorned by much of the rest of the world, countries who once looked to us in admiration. Clearly, not enough American voices have risen in protest. We never will know the true number of dead who lost their lives due to this government’s unjust and failed policies in Iraq. I well remember and understand the frustrations that led to your radical actions. On some level, I don’t believe you need to apologize for them. To be honest, I much prefer the nonviolent tactics of Gandhi, as did many others at the time (including the martyred Dr. King), but they proved largely ineffectual. In the 1960s, peaceful resistance was not for the young, passionate, and impatient.

When we finally manage to leave Iraq, schools will be rebuilt by their own citizens, a government that specifically suits them will be instituted, and their daily utility services will be restored more quickly than had we stayed. We will have the luxury of staying out of other countries’ civil wars only when we reduce our dependence on oil from foreign, oil-rich regions. We must be less wasteful and more ingenius about devising truly safe alternatives to oil. Automobiles and furnaces must be invented and in wide use that don’t rely on gasoline and oil consumption. If all this happens, then rebels–like you and your wife once were–will not be needed. Suprisingly (to some), we will be much safer from politically-motivated terrorism than we are, now.

The self-righteous people who wrote those scathing comments above will never realize why your seemingly-excessive tactics seemed necessary back then. Thank you for writing about your life.

Penny

What do you do when you can’t stand to see the death and destruction that your state is perpetrating? Even if the Weathermen were somewhat naive and overzealous, you were motivated to do something about the injustices being committed by the state. If nothing else, it raised peoples’ awareness about the issues. And you always made an effort not to hurt people, focusing on property damage.

Inevitably the mainstream media would like to paint you and your former group members as the embodiment of evil. It is easier to see the world in black and white than to look for complexity and nuance. Best wishes to you and thank you for your honesty.

“Hateful explicatives (sic)” are not something from which one should infer a “lack of inteligence (sic)”. The fact is that they result more often from a simple lack of imagination and not from a person being less than you. You may also think that it is the only way these people know how to explain their bitter frustration over the situation but that certainly is also wrong.

However a true lack of intelligence can be more rightfully ascribed to the person I assume to be Ayers’ fellow professor at the University of Illinois – Chicago. When you cannot spell correctly or properly construct sentences you have no standing for dismissing those who dissent from your opinions as being stupid. Your fundamental overarching elitism is showing through your thin veneer of erudition.

With respect to your last sentence I think it would have been far more accurate and honest of you to actually capitalize the ‘d’ in your “anti-democratic” to properly reflect the manner in which truly mean the word.

Returning to your basic thesis, it uses an infantile approach to debate the merit of a given position. You chose to sink to a process of simplistic unhelpful counter-citation. Can any given action or thought be made good if a subjectively worse action or thought is found with which to compare it?

Using your own theory of validation, since I too was present during the 1960’s and 1970’s and I also spell better than you do I must be better able to assess the discussion at hand. Given those facts, my position is that you’re wrong, I’m right and Ayers is a narcissistic, self-important equivocating fool.

Amazingly this is one time it appears that using your approach leads to a valid conclusion. When using this process to evaluate you the jury is still out…I think…

My point is lets don’t rewrite history. If you didn’t live during those times as I did, don’t believe everything the network news is spewing lately. I’m not saying that I agree with the actions of the Weathermen, but clearly they were not terrorists or murderers. You may not agree with their politics, but google the name Fred Hampton and then research the outcome in the courts years later when justice was sought. There were other motivations for the actions of the Weathermen other than just the war. Before you spout hate, please know what you are talking about. Because, believe it or not, our government isn’t always right, nor does it always conduct itself lawfully. And in either case, it is the responsiblity of the citizens to chasten it and lead it back to the tack of justice and freedom.

The hateful explicatives show lack of inteligence. That can be forgiven. Ignorance is another matter.

I await your hateful, uninformed, and intolerant (as in anti-democratic) responses.