Bill Ayers, Unrepentant Activst

Brandy over at Moue Magazine pens a thoughtful post on Salon’s outstanding article, “Bill Ayers Talks Back.” If you haven’t seen it, Salon’s article is more than a “must read”; it’s really a “must-share” and you’ll be doing a great service if you spread it far and wide.

For one, it puts truth to the many lies gleefully spread by right-wing blowhards about this man (he’s not an “unrepentant terrorist”, he didn’t “pal around with Obama”, and he never claimed a wish to have “done more bombings” to protest the war). But beyond that, it eloquently addresses what it means to be an activist in a democracy during times of justified civil protest.

Ayers’s story is not one that mainstream American will easily embrace. Most people prefer the myth of Bill Ayers - just like the greater myth of “The 60s” - because it’s easier to conjure a bomb-throwing terrorist than to tease out the complexities that drive social movements. So while Ayers repudiates his past association with The Weather Underground - he rightly admits being “off the track” and crossing “lines of legality and propriety and common sense” - he remains an unrepentant activist. And that’s not what most people want to hear.

Consider this:

The deeper questions Ayers continues to raise - and the ones that will most certainly elude the capacity of the commercial media to honestly address - is “What is terrorism? And what is violence?” These remain critical issues and they deserve to be discussed openly and unemotionally. That’s not the kind of discussion we can expect on mainstream news, but it’s one we can certainly have among ourselves. I hope we do.

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