Bill Ayers

Play this fabulous trailer:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mother-country-radicals/id1625882016

EPISODE # 49) The Dialectic of Freedom

Everything’s in motion, everything in flux, nothing and no one stays the same: the young become the old, stories get retold, and the blowtorch of history illuminates the path ahead. That’s the way of time—the center cannot hold, and everything that is solid melts into air. I pause and sit down with my friend and comrade Wayne Au to talk about dialectics, contradiction, and the meaning of freedom. Dr. Au is a professor in the School of Educational Studies at the University of Washington Bothell, a scholar/activist, and a deeply engaged social justice organizer. Wayne is an editor at my favorite teaching magazine, Rethinking Schools, and the author of A Marxist Education: Learning to Change the World, an essential text for understanding the mess we’re in, and the possibilities before us.

https://tribecafilm.com/films/a-discussion-and-world-premiere-of-mother-country-radicals-with-bernardine-dohrn-billy-ayers-and-zayd-dohrn-2022

48) I Have a Story to Tell

I remember when in 2003 Ruth Simmons, the first Black president of an Ivy League school, launched an investigation into Brown University’s toxic ties to slavery. That illuminating and inspiring effort began with questions: What do we know? Who is visible in history? What stories are missing or suppressed? What is owed? Harvard just released a report revealing its own links to America’s original sin—one illuminating contrast is the names of the wealthy and the powerful (Increase Mather, Governor John Winthrop) alongside the human beings they enslaved who bore a single name or no name at all:  Juba, Cesar, Venus, “The Moor.” What are their stories? What wisdom and richness is denied? Tara Betts, thinker and creator, mentor and teacher, author of  the poetry collections Arc & Hue, Break the Habit, and the forthcoming Refuse to Disappear, joins me Under the Tree for a conversation about poetry, teaching, and the need for radical repair in this urgent moment.

So the Republican Party supports forcing women to give birth against their will, but opposes providing childcare, paid leave or healthcare. Got it.

Kathy Boudin is gone.

She died just as she had lived: fighting for life, surrounded by love, intrepidly building community and casting those invisible but sturdy threads in every direction, connecting family and friends, colleagues and comrades, neighbors and strangers. 

To be loved by Kathy—to love her—lit up the whole sky.

Kathy is dead. 

But fire doesn’t die. Light and heat and love and desire go on and on. 

And so does she.

Rest in Power, Sister/Comrade.

May Day, 2022