Clarifying the Facts— a letter to the New York Times, 9-15-2001

September 15, 2001

To The Editors—

In July of this year Dinitia Smith asked my publisher if she might interview me for the New York Times on my forthcoming book, Fugitive Days. From the start she questioned me sharply about bombings, and each time I referred her to my memoir where I discussed the culture of violence we all live with in America, my growing anger in the 1960’s about the structures of racism and the escalating war, and the complex, sometimes extreme and despairing choices I made in those terrible times.

Smith’s angle is captured in the Times headline: “No regrets for a love of explosives” (September 11, 2001). She and I spoke a lot about regrets, about loss, about attempts to account for one’s life. I never said I had any love for explosives, and anyone who knows me found that headline sensationalistic nonsense. I said I had a thousand regrets, but no regrets for opposing the war with every ounce of my strength. I told her that in light of the indiscriminate murder of millions of Vietnamese, we showed remarkable restraint, and that while we tried to sound a piercing alarm in those years, in fact we didn’t do enough to stop the war.

Smith writes of me: “Even today, he ‘finds a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance,’ he writes.” This fragment seems to support her “love affair with bombs” thesis, but it is the opposite of what I wrote:

We’ll bomb them into the Stone Age, an unhinged American politician had intoned, echoing a gung-ho, shoot-from-the-hip general… each describing an American policy rarely spoken so plainly. Boom. Boom. Boom. Poor Viet Nam. Almost four times the destructive power Florida… How could we understand it? How could we take it in? Most important, what should we do about it? Bombs away. There is a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance. The rhythm of B-52s dropping bombs over Viet Nam, a deceptive calm at 40,000 feet as the doors ease open and millennial eggs are delivered on the green canopy below, the relentless thud of indiscriminate destruction and death without pause on the ground. Nothing subtle or syncopated. Not a happy rhythm. Three million Vietnamese lives were extinguished. Dig up Florida and throw it into the ocean. Annihilate Chicago or London or Bonn. Three million—each with a mother and a father, a distinct name, a mind and a body and a spirit, someone who knew him well or cared for her or counted on her for something or was annoyed or burdened or irritated by him; each knew something of joy or sadness or beauty or pain. Each was ripped out of this world, a little red dampness staining the earth, drying up, fading, and gone. Bodies torn apart, blown away, smudged out, lost forever.

I wrote about Vietnamese lives as a personal American responsibility, then, and the hypocrisy of claiming an American innocence as we constructed and stoked an intricate and hideous chamber of death in Asia. Clearly I wrote and spoke about the export of violence and the government’s love affair with bombs. Just as clearly Dinitia Smith was interested in her journalistic angle and not the truth. This is not a question of being misunderstood or “taken out of context,” but of deliberate distortion.

Some readers apparently responded to her piece, published on the same day as the vicious terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, by associating my book with them. This is absurd. My memoir is from start to finish a condemnation of terrorism, of the indiscriminate murder of human beings, whether driven by fanaticism or official policy. It begins literally in the shadow of Hiroshima and comes of age in the killing fields of Southeast Asia. My book criticizes the American obsession with a clean and distanced violence, and the culture of thoughtlessness and carelessness that results from it. We are now witnessing crimes against humanity in our own land on an unthinkable scale, and I fear that we might soon see innocent people in other parts of the world as well as in the U.S. dying and suffering in response.

All that we witnessed September 11—the awful carnage and pain, the heroism of ordinary people—may drive us mad with grief and anger, or it may open us to hope in new ways. Perhaps precisely because we have suffered we can embrace the suffering of others and gather the necessary wisdom to resist the impulse to lash out randomly. The lessons of the anti-war movements of the 1960s and 70s may be more urgent now than ever.

Bill Ayers Chicago, IL

A Classroom Dialogue

It was— as it always is with Matthew Cone’s classes— an invigorating treat to be invited into your ongoing consideration of and engagement with the world. Thank you all. Keep this experience in mind— this immersion in provocative texts, this dialogue around issues that matter to you and to the future of humanity, this struggling with problems and questions  that are in some ways ineffable and that always defy glib and sunny solutions— as you go forward in your formal and informal learning. A long and continuous “I don’t know” is the great engine of forward motion—the already known or established or agreed upon is pretty tame stuff by comparison. Even a brief glance at history will tell you that most of what is taught in school is simply the opinions and prejudices of the time and place you happen to be living puffed up and presented as truth. But nothing is fixed, my friends,everything moves, and to be fully a part of it, you must be in motion yourselves. To be a passionate learner is to be willing to plunge into the unknown, to dive into the wreckage, to thrash around in the stormy seas of uncertainty rather than to sit calmly on the beach basking in what you believe (falsely most of the time) to be intractable and unyielding answers. You modeled that for me last week.

Many loose ends:

Yes, I think there ought to be a draft into public service, no exceptions—maybe every 10 years from the age of 18 onward we should each give a year to what we determine in a democratic process to be the common good.  In a democracy we should take on certain tasks as a whole people, a collective citizenry, a public: Education, Public Safety, Access to clean air, water, and food, Transportation, Health care, Defense, and more. We should struggle then over access and equity and the meaning and direction of our common pursuits, and the struggles could be intense, but we do have a common interest in an educated citizenry, for example, a healthy public and so on. And in regard to the military adventures the US so routinely initiates, I can imagine a much more robust debate if  each of us had to take personal responsibility for those decisions. What we have now is a mercenary military, much like the French Foreign Legion made up of paid foreign nationals, and an economic draft—unfair, anti-democratic, easily manipulable— that discriminates against poor and working people. With the recent creation of 19th Century labor conditions in most of the world in the service of 21st Century consumption habits in the over-developed countries, poor kids have no real choices: many of my students, like the Jessica Lynch’s and Lindy England’s, are kids who aspire to teach or do some other good work and can find no path out of poverty or into higher ed except through the fire and the minefields of unwanted war. We should all be ashamed of that.

I think pacifism is a noble choice and there’s a range of ways to claim that mantle. I favor the Dorothy Day way or the Dave Dellinger way: non-violent direct action on all fronts against all forms of violence, hidden or overt. It’s a hard life, but worthy of our awe and admiration. Most people who pay lip service to peace and love are demonstrable hypocrites—they offer huge exceptions to who should not be killed or coerced, or they ignore the monstrous violence roiling just beneath the surface of things— including leaders of major religious denominations, government officials, commentators and public intellectuals. It’s a stretch for most of us to claim any relationship to pacifism simply because we never killed anyone and we abhor fighting—good for us. But  we do live in a remarkably violent society— the largest arms maker and exporter, the hugest military machine ever established, war after war marking our national history, violent social relations from occupation to invasion to vast forced inequities in terms of access to wealth— and our unawareness of  the facts of our situations is largely due to the privilege of wilful blindness. So we return to the first requirement of choosing a moral life: we must open our eyes and look beneath the lights and noise and beyond the bread and circuses.

There is no easy way to solve the mess we created in Iraq, and I include in my indictment the mess we created decades ago, not merely the current catastrophe. Viet Nam is a different story altogether—VN was after all a popular peasant-led social revolution that reordered economic and social relations and was embraced by the Vietnamese people—even though there are many similarities in terms of the attitude and understanding of the invaders. We have a tendency in our culture to see everything here and now and instantly or easily grasped. It’s not how the world works. A good rule of thumb is to historicize everything, connect everything, keep asking how things link up and move from one to another. The US may well bomb Iran: What happened in 1953 that contributed to the situation today? Who was Mossadegh and who was the Shah? What was the hostage crisis? We could try to look more deeply/historically into the collapse of European imperialism, the rise of revolutionary nationalism, the murder and suppression of secular progressive by the West, the coming of religious fundamentalism as a reaction of despair and fatalism, and more. But what we must also do is to look at deep problems whose resolutions will go a long way toward justice and then peace: inequitable distribution of resources, widening gap between haves and have-nots, huge imbalances in power and self-determination, and more. And then we might be vigilant about opportunities to push our government to become a nation among nations, a leader in justice, peace, and balance, rather than the dictatorial uber-nation that rules an inevitably increasingly unstable world.

I do hope you all commit to doing good in the world, and I hope too that you see that good intentions are never enough. Oprah starts a school and is shocked when things go wrong—the local papers say that’s just the way things are in Africa with “those people.” Angelina adopts a bunch of kids and there are millions more to go. French humanitarian workers are arrested in Chad kidnapping 100 kids to be adopted “for their own good.” And so it goes. The problem isn’t that they need to do more, it’s that they need to do different.
They need to see things from a wider angle of regard. They and you need to work in solidarity with not in service to. You need to see that African poverty, for example, is neither natural nor inevitable, but the result of choices made, actions taken, systems and structures and laws and policies made by human beings, and subject then to your intelligent inquiry and understanding, and subject to debate and change. Don’t aspire to be Lady Bountiful; look instead to Ella Baker and Franz Fanon, Myles Horton and Jane Addams, Nelson Peery and Deborah Meier, Grace Lee Boggs and Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. Each made a mark, and each lived out the ethical principle of the oneness of humanity. We don’t need now to calculate what is enough in terms of devotion and commitment; we only need to calculate what is a start. This is the urgency: Live!!! And have blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.

Best, Bill

To see: Central Station; The Battle of Algiers
To read on Africa: King Leopold’s Ghost; Reflections on Exile(Said); We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Children; The Wretched of the Earth; Things Fall Apart; How Europe Underdeveloped Africa…….

DEFEND WARD CHURCHILL

Dear Colleagues,

In Brecht’s play Galileo the great astronomer sets forth into a world dominated by a mighty church and an authoritarian power: “The cities are narrow and so are the brains,” he declares recklessly. “Superstition and plague. But now the word is: since it is so, it does not remain so. For everything moves my friend.” Intoxicated with his own radical discoveries, Galileo feels the earth shifting and finds himself propelled surprisingly toward revolution. ” It was always said that the stars were fastened to a crystal vault so they could not fall,” he says. “Now we have taken heart and let them float in the air, without support… they are embarked on a great voyage—like us who are also without support and embarked on a great voyage.” Here Galileo raises the stakes and risks taking on the establishment in the realm of its own authority, and it strikes back fiercely. Forced to renounce his life’s work under the exquisite pressure of the Inquisition he denounces what he knows to be true, and is welcomed back into the church and the ranks of the faithful, but exiled from humanity—by his own word. A former student confronts him in the street: “Many on all sides followed you with their ears and their eyes believing that you stood, not only for a particular view of the movement of the stars, but even more for the liberty of teaching— in all fields. Not then for any particular thoughts, but for the right to think at all. Which is in dispute.”

The right to think at all, which is in dispute—-this is what the Ward Churchill affair finally comes to: The right to a mind of one’s own, the right to pursue an argument into uncharted spaces, the right to challenge the church and its orthodoxy in the public square. The right to think at all.

It’s no surprise that this outrage against Professor Churchill occurs at this particular moment— a time of empire resurrected and unapologetic, militarism proudly expanding and triumphant, war without justice and without end, white supremacy retrenched, basic rights and protections shredded, growing disparities between the haves and the have-nots, fear and superstition and the mobilization of scapegoating social formations based on bigotry and violence or the threats of violence, and on and on. There’s more of course, and this isn’t the only story, but this is a recognizable part of where we’re living, and a familiar place to anyone with even a casual understanding of history. Here the competing impulses and ideals that have always animated our country’s story are on full display: rights and liberty and the pursuit of human freedom on one side, domination and war and repression on the other. The trauma of contradictions that is America.

Ward Churchill is under a sustained, orchestrated, and determined attack because of his political beliefs and statements and activities, and nothing more. No one doubts his productivity or his accomplishments. But the attack on Churchill is neither isolated nor innocent— the high school history teacher on the west side of Chicago gets the message, and so does the English literature teacher in Detroit and the math teacher in an Oakland middle school: be careful what you say; stay close to the official story; stick to the authorized text. If someone of Ward Churchill’s stature and standing for so many years at the University of Colorado can suffer this kind of campaign, what chance do I have?

Every committee, every investigation, every report plays out under a shadow of the star chamber; everyone must choose who to be and how to act in response. For this reason I support Ward Churchill unequivocally, unapologetically, whole-heartedly. I urge my colleagues and my students and everyone who values education as a grand enterprise geared toward enlightenment and liberation to speak out forcefully and fearlessly now on behalf of the liberty of teaching and learning, on behalf of the right to think at all.

Sincerely,
William Ayers
Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar
University of Illinois at Chicago
billayers.org

Letter to Marv

February 2, 2007

Dear Marv—

Thank you, thank you for encouraging people to read the books, certainly, and for inviting me to speak with your wonderful colleagues and the incredible Urban Teacher folks.  I left energized and excited—mostly to meet a group of young people who are so smart and engaged, reflective and curious, hard-working and energetic, ethically ambitious and committed.  What a wondrous teaching life you’re inhabiting.
But I also left gasping for breath—so many roads opened, so many issues raised, so much flying through the air, and nothing really brought to an end.  I felt inadequate to the task in a thousand ways.  So, for me and for you, for everyone I think, the conversation must simply continue.
Large contradictions productively punctuated much of the discussion, I thought, and several specific questions floated within them.  One, of course, was the tension for teachers of working in real classrooms in real schools and systems while fighting to hold on to and find ways to enact their best thinking about learning and teaching.  This is a contradiction I’ve never resolved in my own teaching, but one that I think must be acknowledged and addressed continually.   In other words, teachers who put the tension easily to rest by embracing one or the other branch, will find themselves less productive with students and ultimately dissatisfied with themselves.  The alternative is to choose this tension as a space within which to discuss and to struggle, a place to live, a contradiction to teach into.
I think all conscientious teacher need to ask themselves this: What do I need to know in order to be successful with this kid and with this one and with this one?  Surely knowledge of subject matter and the curriculum and the disciplines is an important part of the answer.  And, of course, knowledge about the school and its expectations.  But no less important is knowledge about the child, and more: knowledge about the contexts and circumstances of his or her life—family, community, culture, and on and on—knowledge of the society and the world we’re initiating youngsters into.  And don’t forget knowledge of yourself.  This is not only vast, but it’s also dynamic and swirling and expanding and changing.  So our work is cut out for us.
But to say either, “My job is to get kids ready for the real world, for society as it is,” or “My job is to water the little seedlings and watch them grow” is to misunderstand the contradiction and reduce the complexity.  The real world?  Which one?  When I was first teaching I had an argument with colleagues who thought that since the real world was vicious, tough, unfair, competitive, and mean, we should turn our Head Start center into a boot-camp for three-year-olds.
And on the other side, the watering-the-seeds side: I’ve known lots of teachers who wanted desperately to be kind and to be liked, and failed then to challenge kids to read.  “I love these kids so much,” one would say, “and their lives are so hard, I just want to nurture them.”  Failing to teach them to read is not exactly an act of love.
So the tension: I teach them to read as an act of love; I struggle to nourish and challenge in the same gesture; I respect the people who walk through the door, embrace them as fellow human beings, and I invite and push them toward deeper and wider ways of knowing.
And more: all children need to be given a sense of the unique capacity of human beings to shape and create reality in concert with conscious purposes and plans.  This means that our schools need to be transformed to provide children with ongoing opportunities to exercise their resourcefulness to solve the real problems of their communities.  Like all human beings, children and young people need to be of use.  They cannot just be treated as “objects” and taught “subjects.”  Their cognitive juices will begin to flow if and when their hearts, heads and hands are engaged in improving their daily lives and their surroundings.  Make some space for that.
Just imagine how much safer and livelier and more peaceful our neighborhoods would be almost overnight if we reorganized education.  If instead of trying to keep our children isolated in classrooms, we engaged them in community-building activities with the same audacity with which the civil rights movement engaged them in desegregation activities 40 years ago: planting community gardens, recycling waste, organizing neighborhood arts and health festivals, rehabbing houses, painting public murals.  By giving children and young people a better reason to learn than just the individualistic one of getting a job or making more money, by encouraging them to exercise their minds and their hearts and their soul power we would get their cognitive juices moving.  Learning would then come from practice.
Instead of trying to bully young people to remain in classrooms isolated from the community and structured only to prepare them for a distant and quickly disappearing and hostile job market, we need to recognize that the reason why so many young people drop out from inner city schools is because they are voting with their feet against an educational system which sorts, tracks, tests, and rejects or certifies them like products of a factory.  They are crying out for another kind of education that gives them opportunities to exercise their creative energies because it values them as human beings.
In fact, formal education as it is now structured bears a large part of the responsibility for our present crisis.  By its failure to provide young people with experiences in how to be responsible citizens, it has produced several generations of morally sterile technicians who have more know-how than know-why.
Look at Article 29 (1) of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: “State Parties agree that the education of the child shall be directed to:
(a)  The development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential;
(b)  The development of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and for the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations;
(c)  The development of respect for the child’s parents, his or her own cultural identity, language and values, for the national values of the country in which the child is living, the country form which he or she may originate, and for civilizations different form his or her own;
(d)  The preparation of the child for responsible life in a free society, in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes, and friendship among all peoples, ethnic, national and religious groups and person of indigenous origins;
(e)  The development of respect for the natural environment.”
We might start in our classrooms by trying to live up to this simple, eloquent internationally recognized standard.
Of course we’re up against a series of obstacles, and we talked some about expectations and stereotypes concerning teachers, kids, whole communities.  The path ahead isn’t easy for anyone.  There’s no formula or easy way laid out to become a great teacher.  The one commitment we can each make—a kind of standard we can aspire to forever—is to work toward living our teaching lives in such a way that they don’t make a mockery of our teaching values.

Best,

Bill

A Visit to Champaign-Urbana

To Daniel and the Energetic, Wondrous, and Hopeful Early Childhood Education Students:

That was fast! Zoom! Zoom! I was back in Chicago at 4:30, but sorry to leave so abruptly. Next time I’ll stay.
I think I answered a few of your question—3? 4?—but didn’t get to most. So here goes:
1) On discipline and classroom management: Try hard to create a classroom culture that is purposeful, varied, engaging, fair. Try to have a range of relevant activities available. Try to have materials that people can use without much external direction and assistance. Every day ask: Is the classroom engaging? For everyone? Is the pace and sequence and rhythm of the day appropriate?
Get this right (and it’s never perfect, but rather always a work-in-progress) and lots of behavioral stuff will take care of itself. But ok, people mess up. When someone does, that’s not an occasion for anger or shock, but rather, it’s the occasion for a “teachable moment”—a time to talk about why we use words and not fists, or why that hurt her feelings, or why…
The repertoire in too many schools is narrow, and runs from humiliation to exclusion. Promise yourself that you’ll never humiliate a student, and that you seriously, truly do not want to exclude anyone. We strive for the dignity of each in an inclusive community. Try to live up to that promise.
2) Alternative assessment: All this means is that teachers make judgments and assessments all the time, and you should search for ways to understand your students that go deeper than a score on a test. You should build a system to collect, save, and display student work—massive amounts of it. You should interview each kid regularly—at least once a month and often informally—to get a feel for how each is experiencing class. You should help each articulate goals and agendas. And you should keep observational notes (observe kids at work at least 15 minutes morning, and 15 minutes afternoon) on the class, review them regularly, and see who you’re missing. You can ask focusing questions to help you observe: Why have I not seen Maria in my notes for several weeks? When is Hector more engaged?
3) Starting with strengths: This is the challenge—to see human capacity in an environment that surfaces weaknesses. In a prison, toughness is visible; in too many classrooms there bad behavior is visible. Build a space with multiple entry-points and several pathways to success. I know an extraordinary prison (it’s true!) where writers’ workshops reveal the poet inside the thugish exterior, the gardener inside the felon. If they can do it, you—with a class of six-year-olds—can do it too.
4) Avoid burnout: Create provisions for Teacher Talk, a professional conversation where you can get support and ideas (see To Teach). Do things at your own adult level that you advocate and want your kids to do: read good books, eat well, sleep at night, be an involved citizen in some civic organization, make art, exercise. Being able to notice that the world is crazy doesn’t make you sane; resisting the madness actively, opposing things that offend your humanity is the path to balance.
5) Favorite teachers: I’ve loved so many—Miss Erickson in kindergarten because she was “nice” and she told marvelous stories and she loved me; Mr. Ainsworth, my gay high school math teacher, because he had two little dogs named “Trig” and “Geo” who came to class with him, and because he liked us; Professor Mayer because he challenged me to think deeply about the world and he liked us; Maxine Greene because she blew my mind, and she liked us.
Here’s the pattern: memorable teachers come to teach, and they embrace their students’ humanity—they like us.
6) I included “Everything I Needed to Know…” because it was just new when I published my first book—it wasn’t yet a cliché—and because it contains an essential truth: the deep and mysterious lessons are available to human beings from the start. Everything else is just elaboration.
7) As you teach, you learn. I’ve learned so much, mostly specific and local—Darryl loves to sing left to himself, Hannah gets disruptive when she’s hungry, Angel can work hard early but tires easily. Sometimes I’ve learned about myself—I need to read more in this or that area; I need to be more directive and less laid-back; I have trouble being patient with whiny people. Sometimes I’ve learned from students about huge (but invisible to me) parts of the world—illegal immigrants, alcoholism and anorexia, homelessness, gambling, workers at the race track. One thing I know: follow any human being two steps into her or his lived life and world, and all the received wisdom, easy assumptions, clichés, and stereotypes fall away. Each of us is an entire universe, the one and only who will ever trod this earth, a work-in-progress and an unruly spark of meaning-making energy on a voyage toward infinity. How great is that?
8) There’s more, of course. See http://www.billayers.org if you like. Peace!

In Defense of Poetry….A Letter to the NYT, October, 2002

To The Editors:

The logic and structure of good journalism are poorly fitted for poetry. Spreading myths and printing falsehoods may violate the standards of a decent newspaper but they are the very stuff of poetry, and that’s why no one with an ounce of sense goes to Homer or Neruda or Schymborska or Bob Dylan for the facts. When you instruct your readers that the “proper response” to reading Amiri Baraka is “discussion and condemnation” you both confuse the register of poetry, and you beg the question. The great Chicago poet, Gwendolyn Brooks, once asked, “Does man love Art?” Her response: “Man visits art but squirms. Art hurts. Art urges voyages.”

William Ayers

October 2, 2002

A Letter to the Times Found Five Years Later…

September 15, 2001

To The Editors—

In July of this year Dinitia Smith asked my publisher if she might
interview me for the New York Times on my forthcoming book, Fugitive
Days. From the start she questioned me sharply about bombings, and
each time I referred her to my memoir where I discussed the culture of
violence we all live with in America, my growing anger in the 1960’s
about the structures of racism and the escalating war, and the
complex, sometimes extreme and despairing choices I made in those
terrible times.
Smith’s angle is captured in the Times headline: “No regrets for a
love of explosives” (September 11, 2001). She and I spoke a lot about
regrets, about loss, about attempts to account for one’s life. I
never said I had any love for explosives, and anyone who knows me
found that headline sensationalistic nonsense. I said I had a
thousand regrets, but no regrets for opposing the war with every ounce
of my strength. I told her that in light of the indiscriminate murder
of millions of Vietnamese, we showed remarkable restraint, and that
while we tried to sound a piercing alarm in those years, in fact we
didn’t do enough to stop the war.
Smith writes of me: “Even today, he ‘finds a certain eloquence to
bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance,’ he writes.” This
fragment seems to support her “love affair with bombs” thesis, but it
is the opposite of what I wrote:

We’ll bomb them into the Stone Age, an unhinged American politician
had intoned, echoing a gung-ho, shoot-from-the-hip general… each
describing an American policy rarely spoken so plainly. Boom. Boom.
Boom. Poor Viet Nam.
Almost four times the destructive power Florida… How could we
understand it? How could we take it in? Most important, what should
we do about it? Bombs away.
There is a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a
safe distance. The rhythm of B-52s dropping bombs over Viet Nam, a
deceptive calm at 40,000 feet as the doors ease open and millennial
eggs are delivered on the green canopy below, the relentless thud of
indiscriminate destruction and death without pause on the ground.
Nothing subtle or syncopated. Not a happy rhythm.
Three million Vietnamese lives were extinguished. Dig up Florida and
throw it into the ocean. Annihilate Chicago or London or Bonn. Three
million—each with a mother and a father, a distinct name, a mind and a
body and a spirit, someone who knew him well or cared for her or
counted on her for something or was annoyed or burdened or irritated
by him; each knew something of joy or sadness or beauty or pain. Each
was ripped out of this world, a little red dampness staining the
earth, drying up, fading, and gone. Bodies torn apart, blown away,
smudged out, lost forever.

I wrote about Vietnamese lives as a personal American responsibility,
then, and the hypocrisy of claiming an American innocence as we
constructed and stoked an intricate and hideous chamber of death in
Asia.
Clearly I wrote and spoke about he export of violence and the
government’s love affair with bombs. Just as clearly Dinitia Smith
was interested in her journalistic angle and not the truth. This is
not a question of being misunderstood or “taken out of context,” but
of deliberate distortion.
Some readers apparently responded to her piece, published on the same
day as the vicious terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, by
associating my book with them. This is absurd. My memoir is from
start to finish a condemnation of terrorism, of the indiscriminate
murder of human beings, whether driven by fanaticism or official
policy. It begins literally in the shadow of Hiroshima and comes of
age in the killing fields of Southeast Asia. My book criticizes the
American obsession with a clean and distanced violence, and the
culture of thoughtlessness and carelessness that results form it.
We are now witnessing crimes against humanity in our own land on an
unthinkable scale, and I fear that we might soon see innocent people
in other parts of the world as well as in the U.S. dying and suffering
in response.
All that we witnessed September 11—the awful carnage and pain, the
heroism of ordinary people—may drive us mad with grief and anger, or
it may open us to hope in new ways. Perhaps precisely because we have
suffered we can embrace the suffering of others and gather the
necessary wisdom to resist the impulse to lash out randomly. The
lessons of the anti-war movements of the 1960s and 70s may be more
urgent now than ever.

Bill Ayers
Chicago, IL

Curiouser and Curiouser (this is the next go around to the immediately prior post)

CURIOUSER and CURIOUSER

Another go-round. The thinking gets twistier.
My son reminded me that Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a founder of the
ACLU, was expelled from that organization because of her membership in
the CP. Others have sent me wonderful (and quite radical) statements
from John Dewey himself. A favorite anecdote: When Maxim Gorky was
in New York in 1905, he was refused lodging at several hotels because
he was traveling with a woman not his wife. The Deweys “invited the
couple to their home,” and hosted a reception for students “in honor
of the non-Mrs. Gorky.”

Dear Bill,

I take full responsibility for being the one who cannot invite you,
but you mistake me if you infer therefore that I think of education
ever as an apolitical endeavor. The politics of what we are doing
here is keenly felt. I embrace having our efforts identified with
radicalism, but I am opposed to the claim that violence should be part
of the solution. Civil disobedience means challenging and even
provoking authority, but it is conscientiously non violent. I am
sorry to be drawn into what seems like a very prissy judgment about
you and your past. It’s not about whether you have paid your debt to
society. My primary concern is that your celebrated recent book and
“I regret none of it stance” not become the banner for our School of
Education.
I’m sorry if our letter was either hurtful or annoying, since as you
say we had no need to inform you of our non-invitation. Perhaps it
will seem less self-important or weasely if you imagine [your friends]
holding my feet to the fire, making us explain our decision, and
certainly not taking the easier, silent course of action.

“Lauren”

Dear Lauren,

I admire your opposition “to the claim that violence should be part of
the solution”. I make no such claim myself, and believe, in fact, that
non-violent resistance is preferable whenever possible. Of course your
opposition puts you into direct conflict with your own government, the
greatest purveyor of violence on earth, as Martin Luther King, Jr.
noted more than once. We live in fact in a sewer of violence, often
exported, always rationalized and hidden through mystification and the
frenzied use of bread-and-circuses. If endorsing your opposition is
the oath that must be spoken in order to attend your conference or to
come to your School of Education—and I don’t think it should be—
consider the exclusions: both of your US Senators, the president and
his cabinet, the liberal head of the New School and the reactionary
front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination (both of whom
committed war crimes that they’ve refused to account for), military
recruiters, of course, and anyone not a pacifist, and, oh, don’t
forget Nelson Mandela— he wasn’t in prison all those years only for
civil disobedience.

I’ve never claimed that my actions were superior to yours, for
example— actually, I’m not sure what specifically you participated
in then or now, but I know folks who built counter-institutions,
organized in factories, emigrated to Africa or Europe to get away from
the madness for awhile, built communes and collectives, fought for a
peace-and-justice platform inside the Democratic Party, and a lot
else. I don’t think all of it was brilliant or perfect, of course, but
nor was it entirely stupid. I’ve said repeatedly that no one with eyes
even slightly open can reach the age of sixty and not have countless
regrets, and I have my share, but I can’t think of a single action I
took against the government and its murderous assault in Southeast
Asia that I regret. Perhaps you can point to something in particular
that you think I should regret, and then apologize for. I’d consider
it. But I certainly don’t denigrate non-violent resistance—I’ve
admired and participated in direct action for forty years, most
recently last week.

I’ve taught at UIC for twenty years, and I don’t think anyone here
considers either my presence or any of my writings emblematic. I’ve
given several commencement addresses— one at a school just down the
road from you— and countless lectures— two at your university—
and again, I doubt that anyone thought that I’d left a banner—
perhaps not even an impression. I can’t imagine what forces would have
to come together to make Fugitive Days “the banner” for your School of
Education. Is anyone proposing such a thing? It seems utterly
preposterous, but it raises a question: are all scholars and educators
who might attend your gathering being scrutinized by the same standard
to determine whether their writings might inadvertently become your
banner?

If I’m as radioactive as you seem to think— so contaminating that
simply being around me is a threat to the good people— maybe you
should spread the alarm to my dean, my university, my publishers, the
organizers of the dozens of events I’ve been asked to address in the
next several months. You won’t be the first, of course— you’ll be
joining a campaign already underway, fueled by David Horowitz, Sol
Stern, Chester Finn, and more.

Your choice to exclude me is neither here nor there, and I don’t take
it personally. Please don’t take my response personally either—I
really have no idea about your politics or your commitments or your
activities or your projects, and I’m willing to assume for now that in
your work and in your life you stand steadfastly for humanism,
progressivism, peace and justice.

Sincerely,
Bill

KAPPAN Backtalk: A Response to Christine and Laughlin

In spite of Gary Laughlin’s thoughtless repetition of the clichés and received wisdom regarding the pathology of the “inner city” family, the central point of his note is important and, I believe, correct: all human beings, and most markedly adolescents, need a nurturing environment and a place to belong in order to thrive. There’s overwhelming evidence that adolescents do much better on several important measures when they are allowed to participate in smaller, more intimate learning communities. It’s not rocket science, to use another cliché.
An important part of the evidence is simply to notice what the most privileged people in our society provide for their kids—schools with a focus and a clear mission, small classes, lots of special programs. But there’s other evidence: countless studies not only affirm the value of smaller learning communities, but show further that kids who are poor or from traditionally oppressed groups benefit most in these settings.
None of this—and let’s add here Charles Christine’s call for “relevance” in high school programs and a culture that he calls “camaraderie”—leads logically to the conclusion that we ought to support JROTC per se in urban schools. We could, as well, support breaking big schools into smaller, themed academies, or we could advocate for a generously funded program of clubs and teams in which all would participate, or we could develop an intense and engaging community apprenticeship/internship/mentoring program. Or a lot else. Why JROTC, and why only JROTC?
Mr. Laughlin finds it “reprehensible” that I would allow my “personal views to dictate what is correct”—an odd reprimand since my “personal views” are the only ones I have, just as his “personal views” are the only ones he has, and in any case having “personal views” is not the same as sitting on a stiff chair in an arid room under a single bare bulb refusing all experience, art, conversation, input, dialogue, and literature, which I don’t do, and neither does he, I hope—and then turns approvingly to a “Rand study” in support of his views. I’ve seen a lot of studies on JROTC and they have several predictable problems. Bill Bigelow from Rethinking Schools points out that JROTC is an elective in most places, and that if kids don’t attend or do poorly, they’re simply removed from the rolls. Further, comparing JROTC with the general school population is fundamentally flawed because in many places it’s promoted as an accelerated program, in others kids are hand-picked to participate, and in still others it’s the most hopeful pathway to scholarship money and a college education. So, give kids something where they have nothing, offer them some attention in big, anonymous and failing schools, and certainly they’ll do better. A more meaningful comparison would be between the attendance and grades of JROTC kids to, say, kids enrolled in AP classes. The only problem with that hypothetical study is that most of these schools don’t offer AP classes.
And so we’re left to warrant JROTC in its own right. And here I return to my original argument: militarizing the schools is bad for teachers and terrible for kids, it undermines meaningful and robust education, and it distorts our democratic values and the possibility of building a culture of democracy. According to the military the goal of JROTC is “to create favorable attitudes and impressions toward the services and towards careers in the Armed Forces.” This, then, requires that we accept and warrant the role of our military in our lives and the world. And while JROTC sells itself as a promoter of “character” and “discipline,” the means to that imagined end involve fear, intimidation, shame, and unquestioning obedience. Dr. Christine’s “camaraderie” can be a product of the basest, most vile bonding rituals, as history has taught us over and over again.
Dr. Christine’s letter is built on the idea that the US military is a beneficent force in the world—he cites the Strategic Air Command motto “Peace is our Profession” as accurate, and says, without any irony whatsoever, that, “There have always been and will always be nation states that further their interests by dominating their weaker neighbors.” From my perspective—my “personal view” based on boat-loads of evidence—that sentence perfectly describes US foreign policy from its inception until today.
The courageous journalist I.F. Stone had a simple rule-of-thumb that guided all of his efforts as a reporter, and he urged his colleagues to keep this at the center of their consciousness: Remember, he said, that all governments lie. The old Soviet Union, of course, and China, but also Algeria, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Dominica, Egypt, France, the Gambia—the entire alphabet of nations lies. And in spite of our hopes and aspirations and mystifications, the US is no exception. In fact the US—near the bottom of the alphabet—is near the top of the list of liars. Perhaps it’s US military power or economic reach, perhaps it’s the sense of self-importance and destiny, but whatever drives it, our government lies to us and to the world from morning until night.
A brief history lesson should at least allow us to proceed as skeptics:
∑ President Polk cast Mexico as the aggressor in 1846, saying it had “Shed American blood upon the American soil”—a lie—and proceeded to seize half of that nation “in self-defense”…
∑ President McKinley said in 1898 that the US had a moral obligation to “liberate” the Cubans from Spain, and later to “civilize” the Filipinos—all lies—as he conquered new territory and murdered hundred of thousands of patriots and resisters and ordinary people…
∑ President Wilson prodded the country into World War I to “make the world safe for democracy”—a lie—as he joined the frenzy to divide the earth and its resources and markets among the old and emerging imperial powers…
∑ President Truman claimed that Hiroshima was a “military target”—a lie—and that dropping nuclear bombs on Japan saved “a million American lives”—an invention of monstrous proportions…
∑ President Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin, and before him Kennedy lied about the extent of US entanglement in Viet Nam, and after each of them Nixon lied about expanding the war into neutral Cambodia…
On and on and on—Reagan lied about Grenada, Bush the First about Panama and Iraq, Clinton about the Sudan… It never ends.
We are today witnessing in public and political life a steady barrage of lying as justification for war, invasion, repression, torture, constant surveillance, and occupation. We are sold a terrifying scenario of risk, as well as a romanticized version of our beneficent mission in the world. Educators must ask ourselves if we are helping our students look critically at these and other received truths steadily raining down upon them from the powerful. Are they able to separate fact from fancy? Can they interrogate whatever nonsense is given to them? Can they identify arguments and sort through conflicting claims and various sources of information in a steady and thoughtful and engaged way? Must they obediently conform to all they’re told? Can they talk back? Can they imagine themselves acting effectively within the world?
We must, with our students, learn to ask the essential questions again and again, and then find ways to live within and beyond the answers we receive. Who are you in the world? How did you (and me) get here? What can we know? What do we have the right to imagine and expect? Where are we going? Who makes the decisions? Who’s left out? Who decides? Who benefits? Who suffers? What are the alternatives? In many ways these kinds of questions are themselves the answers.
The great American historian Howard Zinn argues that we should “Put Away The Flags”:
On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.
Is not nationalism—that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder—one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

Patriotism is perhaps the single concept in greatest need of being subjected to intense scrutiny and questioning in our country today. We live, after all, in a time of empire resurrected and unapologetic, of war without borders and seemingly without end, of greed enthroned and of a rapidly widening gulf between rich and poor, of the elusive and seemingly intractable barriers to racial justice, and of patriotism rehearsed and paraded in every corner, and yet the basic questions of who we are and where we are eludes us. When National Geographic recently surveyed US young adults, huge percentages couldn’t find Iraq, Israel-Palastine, or even Great Britain on a world map. An astonishing 10% couldn’t find the US. I blame the schools, the media, the misinformation culture. Perhaps we really don’t know where we are in the world, and perhaps we harbor a deep sense that it doesn’t matter much. We’re here, after all, and we matter most; everyone else must pay attention to us because we count, but our attention to them—those masses of others who don’t after all, count as much—is pointless.
This enforced ignorance is part of the logic of patriotism, which is of a piece with the logic of nationalism: anyone who by chance was thrust onto this small specific patch of earth is to consider himself or herself superior to all those unfortunates who were thrust onto some other patch. This beatified place is imagined to be qualitatively unparalleled, so different from all other places that it’s as if a high wall shuts it off from the rest of the world. And walls as metaphors are reinforced with barbed wire erected in East Germany, Israel, and now the US on its southern border. Here, within the wall, a chosen people, so to speak, live blessed lives that are nobler, greater, deeper and wiser and more beneficent than the lives led by any other human beings anywhere else.
This is the constant conceit of patriotism, the narcissistic and arrogant stance. The result is that we are willing to fight, kill, and die—or as is almost always the case, to at least send the children of the laboring classes as proxies to do the killing and dying—in a patriotic fever for real estate before reason.
Samuel Johnson called patriotism “the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and Bertrand Russell, “the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons”—patriotism is justification for murder. And the great Malcolm X advised that no one become “so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality…Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.” Howard Zinn describes the typically disingenuous justification for war:
As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: “The American solider is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness.”
We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture.
Yet they are victims, too, of our government’s lies.

Could patriotism possibly be a universal value? Is it specific? Should all people in the world at all times be patriotic? How about if some specific country or government is a disaster? Should Germans have been patriotic during the Third Reich? Rwandans during the genocide? Israelis or Americans today? Is America always a force for good?
There is in fact—my “personal view”—no fit between patriotism and humanism. The nation-state has been at bottom always an engine for war and repression. Sometimes—as in our own country—a wobbly and outdated concept of a single national identity lords it over the true variety and diversity and pluralism of human life. We need to notice that a single inflamed identity is always a deprivation, and we need to teach into this contradiction. How is it that the broad human beings in Sarajevo of 1992 were transformed into the ruthless Serbs and fierce Croatians of 1993? Violence, of course, creates identity just as identity creates violence. This is the violence of identity, of nationalism, and of patriotism. The “camaraderie” of murder.
Inflamed identities are morally backward, dangerous and destructive, as well as descriptively wrong. As Anartya Sen writes in Identity and Violence, while “a Hutu laborer from Kigali may be pressured to see himself only as a Hutu and incited to kill Tutsis…he is not only a Hutu, but also a Kigalian, a Rwandan, an African, a laborer and a human being.”
Walt Whitman—his crazy exuberance, his limitless faith in possibility, his joy and love and ecstasy spilling out of him in all directions and only occasionally under control, his generous embrace—instructs us in “Song of Myself,” to see ourselves whole and to reject any one-sided, pumped-up, or flushed identity:
I celebrate, and sing myself…
I am an acme of things accomplished,
I am an encloser of things to be…
Do I contradict myself? Very well then
I contradict myself.
(I am large. I contain multitudes.)

Each of us contains multitudes and so we can choose to emphasize identities we share with others. Circumstances will necessarily constrain our choices, but we must note that identity is not destiny. Still we can choose, and still we must.
While we hear people say all the time, “My country right or wrong,” it’s weird to say, “My sister, drunk or sober.” If my sister is wrong, I have an obligation to criticize her, to correct her. If she persists and does great harm, I’m obliged to stop her. No less my country.
It seems plausible, in fact rather simple, to love your family, your neighbors and friends, the land itself, and to simultaneously oppose the state, the government, the military—it’s essential here and now to draw a bright distinction between the American people and the US state. After all there’s no such thing as a single, unified thing, no one narrative, called America. America as a spiritual concept floating above state power or government apparatus or law or military might is simply a myth. It’s this disembodied spirit we’re instructed to love, and yet the state rambles on, leaving wreckage in its wake.
All cultures and societies, of course, teach about themselves, and all cultures tend to assert their supremacy over others. Societies often construct their identities against some imagined other: the Greeks had their barbarians, the American settlers had the Indians. We study our traditions, our own great works, the language, and it moves us toward reverence. And, as Zinn points out, national spirit might be temporarily benign in a soccer match, say, or in a country “lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion.” But no culture or society exists in isolation, and our nation is so huge and so militarized so that “what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.”
Since the study of one’s own tradition is taken-for-granted, we must—as teachers and students—look outside ourselves at others in search of our fuller humanity. We must teach toward becoming citizens of the world, to stretch and to struggle, to reach toward a fuller humanity. A militarized classroom, a military culture stands as an obstacle. That’s why we should kick the military out of our schools.

To Etta

In some ways life underground was simply life—I worked, I hung out with friends, I read the newspaper and went to the movies, I cooked breakfast and dinner. In other ways it was extraordinary because we felt that our lives had a serious purpose that we were conscious of and earnest about every day: to end a war and overthrow a system—imperialism—that made war after war inevitable, and to upend centuries of racial oppression and white supremacy creating a society based on equality, justice, and love. We had high ideals, utopian dreams, and a deep, deep commitment to live it out, to create a life that didn’t make a mockery of our values.
“Enjoy” doesn’t quite capture the feeling of the experience. I’m predisposed to enjoy life—I sometimes joke that it’s a genetic flaw inherited from my mother—and I found joy and pleasure and happiness in every little detail—a walk through the city, watching a sunset, a meal with friends. And, of course, falling in love, having adventures, raising our children. But there’s something equally important, and that is the satisfaction that comes from making a decision to participate as fully as you can in building a better community, fighting against unnecessary suffering and pain, and struggling toward a fairer and more humane social order. There’s some deep satisfaction and enjoyment in trying to participate in history, and make the future.
The experience changed my life forever—made me see the world differently. All the privileges that come from being American, white, and on and on blind you to the fullness of life—the pain and the love, the joy and sorrow. Of course people are blind to their blindspots, anesthetized by comfort, and being underground I became an exile, an uncomfortable person, in my own land. The good thing is that that condition allowed me a kind of double vision, to see the world as an American and to see America as an outsider. There’s real advantages to that because if you become too comfortable, too at home, you will only ever know the walls of your own cave, and even if it has lots of glitter and color, it’s still just a cave. Freedom always lies beyond. And freedom requires us to overcome fear, to learn to act with courage, and then to doubt, and then to act again.
There’s always more. Read Fugitive Days.