Lessons from William Ayers

This article is not written to condone William Ayres 1960s Weather Underground involvement. It is written to emphasize that Ayers is no longer a terrorist, no matter how his words and actions may have been described forty plus years ago. It is also written to clarify that Ayers never said "I wish we had bombed more!" Finally, this article is written to underline the fact that William Ayers and Barack Obama are not and never have been close associates.

Fact Check will give a good summation of misrepresentations concerning William Ayers and Barack Obama presently employed by the McCain campaign (see Fact check: Obama and Ayers). A further discussion of Obama’s relationship with Ayers, with supporting articles, can be .ound at the following link: Obama Ayers Connection?. These sources show any claims of close association, especially "palling around" to be false. They also disprove the assertion that Obama began his political career at a fund raiser hosted by Ayers. Obama and Ayers do know each other and have served together on the board of directors for a Chicago based charity. Ayers also contributed $200 to Obama's 2001 state senate reelection campaign. Regardless of his Weathermen background during the Vietnam era, William Ayers has since earned the titles of "Senior University Scholar" and "Distinguished Professor" at the University of Illinois. He is also the author of fourteen books.

On September 15, 2001, William Ayers addressed a letter to the New York Times in response to a September 11, 2001 article concerning his upcoming book Fugitive Days, contributed by Times writer Dinitia Smith with the subtitle: "No regrets for a love of explosives." Clearly the Times writer misunderstood Ayers book and his comments during their interview to mean he still condoned Weathermen bombing attempts during the sixties. The coincidental date of the of the article's publication has led to the current McCain campaign charge that Ayers regretted that "we didn't bomb more" on the day of the 9/11 tragedy.

Ayers' Sept 15, 2001 objection to Dinitia Smith's 9/11 misinterpretation of his writing and interview comments makes it clear Ayers then and now opposes terrorism in any form. He explicitly describes his book, Fugitive Days, as "from start to finish a condemnation of terrorism." His writing does point out how violence can lead to violence, however, and the following description has led to the misconstrued idea that Ayers regrets limited results from Weathermen bombing attempts. "I told her (Smith) 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." This comment does not mention, much less extol Weathermen bombing activity, carried out by the way with prior warning and with concern for protecting human life. Though regrettable in themselves, the only deaths from Weathermen bombing activity were those of supporters injured while handling explosive material.

Without condoning Weathermen activity, we may still recognize the group's members as feeling driven to extreme acts by the ever mounting horrors of the Vietnam War. Quoting another passage misconstrued by Dinitia Smith in her Times article: "
How could we understand it? How could we take it in? Most important, what should we do about it?"

Smith misconstrued the following passage to indicate a love of explosives: "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."

This is the awful quiet following a wartime air attack on a clear and otherwise beautiful day as portrayed in William Soutar's WWII era poem, The Children:

Upon the street they lie
Beside the broken stone:
The blood of children stares from the broken stone.

Death came out of the sky
In the bright afternoon:
Darkness slanted over the bright afternoon.

Again the sky is clear
But upon earth a stain:
The earth is darkened with a darkening stain:

A wound which everywhere
Corrupts the hearts of men:
The blood of children corrupts the hearts of men.

Silence is in the air:
The stars move in their places:
Silent and serene the stars move in their places.

But from earth the children stare
With blind and fearful faces:
And our charity is in the children's faces.

Thus Ayers expresses the terror felt by so many contemporary Americans confronting the moral horror of Vietnam: "Three million Vietnamese lives were extinguished. …. 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."

Such horror demanded response, and, as now with events in Iraq and Afghanistan – not to mention African holocausts with which we feel uninvolved, most US citizens went about their daily lives showing little concern. Many of us protested as best we could in that time. Students were indiscriminately gunned down on the Kent State campus; was this not terrorism in its own right? Eventually the nation united in such anguish that its citizens collectively failed to honor the courage of those citizens who fought for their country in a misguided cause. This also is regrettable.

In the September 15, 2001 Times letter, Ayers describes his book in the following way: "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."

His concluding words in this passage are no less telling now than they were in September 2001: "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." These are not the words of one who espouses terror. They are rather those of one who seeks peace and who strives to do everything possible to achieve it.

As citizens of a nation where freedom of thought and expression is cherished, we may need to learn to experience and offer understanding and forgiveness to others regardless of whether or not it is asked. We are often quick to demand repentance from those we consider wrong. We also demand rejection and repudiation of all who express differing views. We seem to no longer find value in a community of competing ideas that wrestle together to achieve a greater understanding than any one individual might reach. Instead, we increasingly isolate ourselves from any challenge to our chosen views, gaining information and even defining truth from the pronouncements of selected individuals and institutions. Our discourse becomes steadily reduced to competing assertions that deny all veracity to opposing views without weight of merit. We shout our preconceived views at each other without listening to hear what anyone else has to offer. Our society is in danger of becoming as polarized as FOX News and MSNBC presently reflect it to be, each presenting a differing world view to be swallowed whole each day by their respective audiences.

Now more than ever we need tolerance for those among us who offer a different approach than what we consider normal. Tolerance for differing views and experiences can help each of us to expand personal horizons, thus promoting individual growth and enrichment. Without the influence of differing ideas we all will only become increasingly narrow in our views over time, growing correspondingly limited in our ability to respond to the wonder of life around us. Above all, peace requires tolerance, conflict denies tolerance. While there are certainly things no democratic society should condone, we must also be judicious in where we place these restrictions lest we harm our own freedom and ultimate humanity in the process.

Concluding his September 15, 2001 New York Times letter, William Ayers has the following wisdom to share: "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."