Interview with a Vampi-- er, '60s Radical
He's the hot topic of the day! People are searching him out on Google!
The name made my brain itch. Yeah, all I gotta do is search for Bill Ayers on my computer.
I talked to Ayers in 2002. We had a long talk. It was my job to do so (no, I'm not a terrorist or radical).
From my detailed notes I found buried in an old file on my computer:
He had written his book, "Fugitive Days: A Memoir." Lucky him, it came out around September, 2001.
He didn't see himself as a terrorist or an ex-terrorist. And he wasn't exactly proud of the Weathermen times of 30 years back.
Ayers told me, from my notes: "The coincidence of the book and the events of September were in many ways terrible, and I was accused of being an unrepentant terrorist again and again, which I consider wrong on both counts. I was never a terrorist and I'm sorry about a lot of things."
"The timing of the release was unfortunate, but in some ways had a positive aspect in that it forces open some questions that need to be talked about. For example, what is terrorism? Certainly what we witnessed on Sept. 11 was an act of pure terror, that is innocent people were targeted for the purpose of intimidation and influencing policy and was carried out by a group of right wing fundamentalist thugs, and in some ways they archived what they wanted, which was to inch us closer to world war, and create the kind of dry, arid society they have in mind. It was a horrible, horrible event, and in many ways, set the world back."
About the Wethermen's use of bombs way back when: "Well, here's the thing... There's no question that we crossed some lines and took certain risks for ourselves and others that are worth debating and discussing But we not only intended not to kill or hurt anybody, but we never did...."
"So there's one chapter that's gotten quoted quite a bit in the media, where I describe a rather flamboyant and outrageous action that the Weather Underground undertook, which was to put a small, one and a half pound bomb in a pipe in the Pentagon that went off in the middle of the night 30 years ago. What I describe in that chapter is a group of young Americans, the Weather people, slightly off-the-track, despairing but determined to go through that action. And I describe another group of young Americans, also off-the-track, also despairing, walking into a village in Vietnam (My Lai) and killing animals, looting, maiming, burning buildings and killing 347 people, mainly women and children, and I raise the question, what is terrorism?"
He talked to me how the Weathermen were basically brainwashing themselves. They tried protest, got clubbed in Chicago '68, saw Nixon get elected, saw the war and the draft drag on, but nothing they did seemed to do any good. So they turned radical, and convinced themselves that they needed to do destructive things.
What he learned from the experience: "We have to resist the kind of dogmatism of our own thinking, we have to resist the sense of self-righteousness, which is portrayed in gaudy detail in the book, the sense of getting ourselves isolated in a little cell of our own creation where all we hear is each other's echoes, and then we start to elevate tactics above strategy and above principal, and that's a disaster. You must act, but you must doubt."
More from my notes: He is one of the co-directors of the Small Schools Workshop in Chicago, and has worked together with a WMU (Western Michigan University) professor on putting together the Gear Up program, which obtained a $14.5 million dollar federal grant to work on school restructuring in schools including Battle Creek, Bangor (two Michigan towns) and three districts in Chicago.
At that time, early 2002, Ayers was a Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, author of bunch of books on education, and an education reformer who was dubbed Deputy Mayor for School Reform in Chicago under Mayor Richard Daley Jr. (son of the Daley of '68).
So, anyway. There's what I found in my computer. Trolls, I know the exact thing you're going to pull out of what I got here. First one to get it gets my special prize.
The name made my brain itch. Yeah, all I gotta do is search for Bill Ayers on my computer.
I talked to Ayers in 2002. We had a long talk. It was my job to do so (no, I'm not a terrorist or radical).
From my detailed notes I found buried in an old file on my computer:
He had written his book, "Fugitive Days: A Memoir." Lucky him, it came out around September, 2001.
He didn't see himself as a terrorist or an ex-terrorist. And he wasn't exactly proud of the Weathermen times of 30 years back.
Ayers told me, from my notes: "The coincidence of the book and the events of September were in many ways terrible, and I was accused of being an unrepentant terrorist again and again, which I consider wrong on both counts. I was never a terrorist and I'm sorry about a lot of things."
"The timing of the release was unfortunate, but in some ways had a positive aspect in that it forces open some questions that need to be talked about. For example, what is terrorism? Certainly what we witnessed on Sept. 11 was an act of pure terror, that is innocent people were targeted for the purpose of intimidation and influencing policy and was carried out by a group of right wing fundamentalist thugs, and in some ways they archived what they wanted, which was to inch us closer to world war, and create the kind of dry, arid society they have in mind. It was a horrible, horrible event, and in many ways, set the world back."
About the Wethermen's use of bombs way back when: "Well, here's the thing... There's no question that we crossed some lines and took certain risks for ourselves and others that are worth debating and discussing But we not only intended not to kill or hurt anybody, but we never did...."
"So there's one chapter that's gotten quoted quite a bit in the media, where I describe a rather flamboyant and outrageous action that the Weather Underground undertook, which was to put a small, one and a half pound bomb in a pipe in the Pentagon that went off in the middle of the night 30 years ago. What I describe in that chapter is a group of young Americans, the Weather people, slightly off-the-track, despairing but determined to go through that action. And I describe another group of young Americans, also off-the-track, also despairing, walking into a village in Vietnam (My Lai) and killing animals, looting, maiming, burning buildings and killing 347 people, mainly women and children, and I raise the question, what is terrorism?"
He talked to me how the Weathermen were basically brainwashing themselves. They tried protest, got clubbed in Chicago '68, saw Nixon get elected, saw the war and the draft drag on, but nothing they did seemed to do any good. So they turned radical, and convinced themselves that they needed to do destructive things.
What he learned from the experience: "We have to resist the kind of dogmatism of our own thinking, we have to resist the sense of self-righteousness, which is portrayed in gaudy detail in the book, the sense of getting ourselves isolated in a little cell of our own creation where all we hear is each other's echoes, and then we start to elevate tactics above strategy and above principal, and that's a disaster. You must act, but you must doubt."
More from my notes: He is one of the co-directors of the Small Schools Workshop in Chicago, and has worked together with a WMU (Western Michigan University) professor on putting together the Gear Up program, which obtained a $14.5 million dollar federal grant to work on school restructuring in schools including Battle Creek, Bangor (two Michigan towns) and three districts in Chicago.
At that time, early 2002, Ayers was a Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, author of bunch of books on education, and an education reformer who was dubbed Deputy Mayor for School Reform in Chicago under Mayor Richard Daley Jr. (son of the Daley of '68).
So, anyway. There's what I found in my computer. Trolls, I know the exact thing you're going to pull out of what I got here. First one to get it gets my special prize.
