Bill Ayers

In the current fight over higher public education we might re-affirm our commitment to a particularly precious and fragile ideal, the belief that every human being is of infinite and incalculable value, each a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, and creative force. Every human being is born free and equal in dignity and rights; each is endowed with reason and conscience, and deserves, then, a sense of solidarity, brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition and respect. And this means that the fullest development of all is the necessary condition for the full development of each; and conversely, the fullest development of each is necessary for the full development of all.

We want our students to be able to participate and engage, to think for themselves, to make judgments based on evidence and argument, to develop minds of their own. We want them to ask fundamental questions—who in the world am I? How did I get here and where am I going? What in the world are my choices? How in the world shall I proceed?—and to pursue answers wherever they might take them. We focus our efforts, not on the production of things so much as on the production of fully developed human beings who are capable of controlling and transforming their own lives, citizens who can participate fully in civic life.

We might declare that in this corner of this place—in this open space we are constructing together—people will begin to experience themselves as powerful authors of their own narratives, actors in their own dramas, the essential architects and creators of their own lives, participants in a dynamic and inter-connected community-in-the-making. Here they will discover a zillion ways to articulate their own desires and demands and questions. Here everyone will live in search of rather than in accordance with or in accommodation to. As we wrangle over what to pass on to the future generation, and struggle over what to value and how, students must find vehicles and pathways to question the circumstances of their lives, and wonder about how their lives might be otherwise. Free inquiry, free questioning, dialogue and struggle must take their rightful place—at the heart of things.

Much of what we call schooling forecloses or shuts down or walls off meaningful questioning and free inquiry. Much of it is based on obedience and conformity, the hallmarks of every authoritarian regime throughout history. Much of it banishes the unpopular, squirms in the presence of the unorthodox, hides the unpleasant. There’s no space for skepticism, irreverence, or even doubt.

The cancellation of an invitation to speak to a legitimate campus group at Wyoming in April is a case in point. Of course I would like to come back now, and in fact the only action that would fully repudiate the wrong decision, and then undo the harm, would be for the president himself, author of that weirdly disingenuous statement (based on a profoundly dishonest narrative), to host me. OK, that’s unlikely, but still…

I’ve said to anyone who’s asked that an invitation should in no way be interpreted as an endorsement, and that inviting someone to campus could be, as well, an opportunity to debate, to sharpen arguments, to engage in spirited disagreement. Perhaps that was the case here. I’ve also pointed out that I am in no way the injured party in any of this. I spoke freely a week ago Monday—to myself, my kids, my colleagues and students—and I was fine. The injured party is the group of faculty and students who wanted to engage me—for whatever reasons (and I have only the vaguest sense of who my original host was, or how the talk might have gone). It was their freedom, not mine, that was trampled, out of misplaced fear or petty expediency, or both.

And then one wonders: if my ideas are so toxic, shouldn’t the noisy posse that shouted down the most basic values in a democracy press the university president to scour the library and purge it of all of my books? Perhaps he should head them off by getting their first, burning the books himself. Who else should be purged, and on what basis? Maybe convicted felons (I’m thinking Martha Stewart, George Ryan, G. Gordon Liddy, and Scooter Libby, but not me since I’ve never been convicted of a felony) should be banned. Or bad role models (all eye-of-the-beholder stuff, for sure, but I’m thinking Elliot Spitzer and Tiger Woods). Or advocates of violence as a proper means of social change (definitely not me, no matter what you hear on the blogasylum, but lots and lots and lots of government officials—from virtually every government in the world). And try to think, then, of what standard exists in the mind of the Wyoming president that impels him to ban me, and only me. What if the French Club invites Sarkozy, or the China Club Hu Jinao or Ha Jin, or the Literature Club Junot Diaz or James Frey or Arundhati Roy, or the Prison Rights Club Mark Clements or Ronnie Kitchens or Nelson Mandela? Should there be a panel to scrutinize every potential speaker and certify them as….what, exactly?

Any way, there is something much greater at stake here than some small speech I might have delivered to 75 students. As campuses contract and constrain, the main victims become truth, honesty, integrity, curiosity, imagination, freedom itself. When college campuses fall silent, other victims include the high school history teacher on the west side of Chicago or in Laramie or Cheyenne, the English literature teacher in Detroit, or the math teacher in an Oakland middle school. They and countless others immediately get the message: be careful what you say; stay close to the official story; stick to the authorized text; keep quiet with your head covered. Oh, freedom.

Wyoming is taking a step onto a slippery slope, and I think journalists, right next to academics and librarians, ought to dispense with the tired and bloodless “he said” and then “he said” and then “he said” form of reporting, and try to explain the serious issues underneath all of this, which have everything to do with whether the public space can be spared for a while longer. Everyone in Wyoming, whatever their politics and orientations, have a stake in the outcome.

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A delightful video emerged from the recent student-led struggles at the University of California organized to resist the grinding and relentless undoing of public higher education: a student attends to her daily routine, writing, reading, sitting in a lecture hall, while the camera focuses here and there, and a voice-over intones: “Pen: $1.69; Textbook: $38; Backpack: $69; Dinner (a tiny packet of dry noodles!): $.50…” And at the end of the list: “Education [pause]…Priceless.” The tag-line is perfect: “There are some things that money can’t buy; don’t let education be one of them.”

The crisis in public higher education (mirror to the crisis in K-12 schooling) is not a joke at all: tuition and fees are sky-rocketing across the country, and are already out of reach for millions; staff cut-backs, lay-offs, and reductions in student services have become common-place; massive student loans have replaced grants and scholarships; class-size is increasing while course offerings are decreasing; hiring freezes and pay-cuts and unpaid mandatory furloughs are on the rise as tenure-track positions are eliminated. These and other “short-term” strategies for dealing with the financial crisis are consistent with the overall direction that has characterized public higher education for decades: “restructuring” as biz-speak for a single-minded focus on the bottom line. And all of this is part of a larger crisis of the state, and larger choices about who pays, and who suffers.

A few snapshots: state support for the University of Illinois system stands at about 16% today, down from 48% two decades ago. In California state colleges will turn away 40,000 qualified students this year, while the community colleges, in a cascading effect, will turn away 100,000. And this year a 32% fee hike is proposed at the University of California at Berkeley, (a proposal that triggered the current student movement there) while the school pays its football coach $2.8 million a year, and is just completing a $400 million renovation of the football stadium. The sports reporter Dave Zirin sums this mess up nicely: “This is what students see: boosters and alumni come first, while they’ve been instructed to cheer their teams, pay their loans, and mind their business.”

These and similar trends are national in scope and impact: the average college graduate is between $20,000 and $30,000 in debt for student loans (not including credit card and other debt), compared to $9,000 in 1994; Pell Grants cover less than 32% of annual college costs; less than 20% of graduate students are unionized, and student labor at below market wages keeps the whole enterprise afloat; tenured and tenure-tack faculty are disappearing, today holding barely 30% of all faculty lines; out-of-state students are increasing in most public schools because they pay significantly higher tuitions, and that pattern is turning public colleges and universities into “engines of inequality,” places with both less access and less equity, less social justice and fewer highly qualified students, private schools in fact, while remaining pubic in name only.

But even this grim picture can be brought into sharper, and it turns out, more painful focus. California spends more on prisons than on higher education—across the country, spending on corrections is six times higher than spending on higher education—and from 1985-2000 Illinois increased spending on higher education by 30% while corrections shot up100%. Here we get a clearer insight into the budget crises that are being rationalized and balanced on our heads: a permanent war economy married to a prison society, with the abused and neglected offspring paying for the sins of the parents.

I’ve been reminded again and again of Don DeLillo’s grimly funny and super-smart novel White Noise, whose narrator is Jack Gladney, a professor of “Hitler Studies” at a small mid-western college, who is sleep-walking through his life to the dull background sounds of TV and endless radio, the muzac of consumerism and electronics, unrestrained advertising and constant technological innovation, appliances and microwaves. When an industrial accident creates what is at first described officially as a “feathery plume,” but later becomes a “black billowing cloud,” and finally an “airborne toxic event,” everything becomes a bit unhinged. Jack’s response to an order to evacuate is disbelief: “I’m not just a college professor,” he whines. “I’m the head of a department. I don’t see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That’s for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the county, where the fish hatcheries are.”

Well, not anymore, Jack. Our own feathery cloud has turned toxic at breath-taking speed, and those folks in the mobile homes might be your natural allies after all. When the administration at Cal closed the libraries and restricted hours of operation to save money, students implemented a 24-hour “Study-In” where they were joined by faculty as well as community members who had never before had access. Folks joined hands and chanted, “Whose university? Our university!” As one grad student said: “When we started we wanted to save the university; today we want to transform it, to decolonize it, to open it up.”

Higher education itself is being radically redefined by the wealthy privateers and the neo-liberals as a product to be bought and sold at the marketplace, a commodity like a car, a box of bolts, or a toilet, rather than either a right (something fought for by generations) or an intellectual, ethical, and spiritual journey (education as enlightenment and liberation). The meteoric rise of for-profit universities (and the mindlessly trailing along by eager university administrators grasping their freshly-minted MBA’s) is one part of that trend. Another piece is private universities competing to secure their advantages at the expense of their “competitors” as well as the public: Harvard with its $36 billion endowment, Northwestern with $7 billion. (Northwestern’s new president offered the silly sentiment that he was hoping to make his university “elite without being elitist,” and one wonders exactly what “public” or “common” interest these tax-exempt institutions serve?)

Perhaps it’s time to envision the world we want to inhabit, and then to begin to live it, here and now, on campus and off. Here are a few possible campaigns as starting points to get our creative and activist juices flowing: cancel all outstanding student debt (good enough for the banks, why not us?); equal pay for equal work; truth in language (a furlough is not a camping trip, it’s a pay-cut; “selective admissions” is more honestly restrictive admissions); universal free open-access high quality public post-secondary schools (whew!).

The current frontal attack on higher public education is an attack on democracy itself. Education is a perennial battleground, for it’s where we ask ourselves who we are as people, what it means to be human here and now, and what world we hope to inhabit. It’s where we assess our chances and access our choices, and it’s where we take up dynamic questions of morality and ethics, identity and location, agency and action. We want to know more, to see more, to experience more in order to do more—to be more competent and powerful and capable in our projects and our pursuits, to be more astute and aware and wide-awake, more fully engaged in the world that we inherit, a world we are simultaneously destined to change.

On March 30, 2010, officials at the University of Wyoming, citing “security threats” and “controversy,” canceled two talks I was invited to give in early April, one a public lecture entitled “Trudge Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action,” and the other, a talk to faculty and graduate students called “Teaching and Research in the Public Interest: Solidarity and Identity.” I’d been invited in August, 2009, but one week before I was to travel to Laramie, I was told I had been “disinvited.”

In February, as the University began to publicize my scheduled visit, a campaign to rescind the invitation was initiated on right-wing blogs, accelerating quickly to a wider space where a demonizing and dishonest narrative dominated all discussion. A wave of hateful messages and death threats hit the University, and was joined soon enough by a few political leaders and wealthy donors instructing officials in ominous tones to cancel my visit to the campus. On March 28 an administrator wrote to tell me that the University was receiving vicious e-mails and threatening letters, as well as promises of physical disruption were I to show up. This is becoming drearily familiar to me, as I’ll explain.

A particularly despicable note from Frank Smith who lives in Cheyenne and is active in the Wyoming Patriot Alliance, said, “Maybe someone could take him out and show him the Matthew Sheppard (sic) Commerative (sic) Fence and he could bless it or something.” He was referring to Matthew Shepard, the young gay man who was tortured and murdered in 1998, left to die tied to a storm fence outside Laramie.

Republican candidate for Governor Ron Micheli released a letter he’d sent to all members of the University of Wyoming Board of Trustees asking them to rescind the invitation. Matt Mead, another gubernatorial candidate, said through a press release that while he is a self-described “fervent believer in free speech and the free exchange of ideas,” that still allowing me to speak would be “reprehensible.” He concluded that I should have “no place lecturing our students.”

I sympathized with the University, and told the folks I was in touch with how sorry I was that all of this was happening to them. I also said that I thought it was a bit of a tempest in a tea pot, and that it would surely pass. Certainly no matter what a couple of thugs threatened to do, I said, I thought that Wyoming law enforcement could get me to the podium, and I would handle myself from there, as I do elsewhere. I said I thought we should stand together and refuse to accede to these kinds of pressures to demonize someone and suppress students’ right to freely engage in open dialogue. After all a public university is not the personal fiefdom or the political clubhouse of the governor, and donors are not permitted to call the shots when it comes to the content or conduct of academic matters. We should not allow ourselves to collapse in fear if a small mob gathers with torches at the gates. I wouldn’t force myself on the University, of course, but I felt that canceling would be terribly unfair to the faculty and students who had invited me, and would send a big message that bullying works. It would be another step down the slippery slope of giving up on the precious ideal of a free university in a free society.

No good. On March 30, 2010 the University posted an announcement of the cancellation of my visit with a long and rambling comment from President Tom Buchanan. He begins with the obligatory assertion that academic freedom is a core principle of the University, but quickly adds that “freedom requires a commensurate dose of responsibility.” We are charged to enact free speech and thought “in concert with mutual respect.”

Nothing that I did or said in this matter was disrespectful or irresponsible, and yet, in the absence of specific references, readers are led to imagine all kinds of offenses.

The announcement is punctuated with a deep defensiveness: anyone who thinks the University “caved in to external pressure,” Buchanan writes, would be “incorrect.” Anticipating what any casual observer would conclude, he builds a strained and somewhat desperate counter-narrative. Buchanan pleads that UW is “one of the few institutions remaining in today’s environment that garners the confidence of the public,” and that a speech by me would somehow undermine that confidence.

He concludes that “this episode illustrated an opportunity to hear and critically evaluate a variety of ideas thoughtfully, through open, reasoned, and civil debate, it also demonstrates that we must be mindful of the real consequences our actions and decisions have on others.” That’s some sentence, and while it’s impossible to know definitively what he’s referring to as the “episode” (it might be the public lecture itself, but then it could be the cancellation of the lecture, or even the barbarians at the gates threatening to burn the place down, or withhold funds, that would provide the opportunity to critically evaluate matters). It has an unmistakable Orwellian ring: we cancelled that lecture as an expression of our support for lectures! And it’s eerily similar to the classics: we destroyed that village in order to save it! Work will make you free! War is peace!

One of the truly weird qualities of the Buchanan statement is a hole in its center, the deafening silence concerning why the campaign against me was organized in the first place. The reason is familiar to me as noted: in the 1960’s I was a leader of the militant anti-war group, Students for a Democratic Society, and then a founder of the Weather Underground, an organization that carried out dramatic symbolic attacks against several monuments to war and racism, crossed lines of legality, of propriety, and perhaps even of common sense. And then during the 2008 presidential I was unwittingly and unwillingly thrust upon the stage because I had known—like thousands of others—Barack Obama in Chicago. The infamous charge that the candidate was “pallin around with terrorists,” designed to injure Obama, also demonized me. I’ve been an educator and professor for decades, but the hard right has accelerated the lunacy against thousands of folks— activists and artists, academics and theorists, outspoken radical thinkers—and wherever possible mounted campaigns exactly like the one in Wyoming. Often university officials stand up on principle and resist the howling mob, as they did recently at St. Mary’s in California; sometimes—as at a student-run conference at the University of Pittsburgh in March—they compromise, restricting access to talks and surrounding a speaker with unwanted and unnecessary police protection; sometimes, as in this case, the university turns and runs. It’s a sad sight.

Of course I wasn’t invited to speak about any of this, and it’s unlikely any of it would have come up without the active campaigning and noisy thunder from the relatively tiny group that is the ultra-right.

I would have focused my talk on the unique characteristics of education in a democracy, an enterprise that rests on the twin pillars of enlightenment and liberation, knowledge and human freedom. Education engages dynamic questions of morality and ethics, identity and location, agency and action. We want to know more, to see more, to experience more in order to do more—to be more competent and powerful and capable in our projects and our pursuits, to be more astute and aware and wide-awake, more fully engaged in the world that we inherit, the world we are simultaneously destined to change.

To deny students the right to question the circumstances of their lives, and to wonder how they might be otherwise, is to deny democracy itself.

It’s reasonable to assume that education in a democracy is distinct from education under a dictatorship or a monarchy; surely school leaders in fascist Germany or Albania or Saudi Arabia or apartheid South Africa all agreed, for example, that students should behave well, stay away from drugs and crime, do their homework, study hard, and master the subject matters; they also graduated fine scientists and musicians and athletes, so none of those things differentiate a democratic education from any other.

What makes education in a democracy, at least theoretically, distinct is a commitment to a particularly precious and fragile ideal: every human being is of infinite and incalculable value, each a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, and creative force. Every human being is born free and equal in dignity and rights; each is endowed with reason and conscience, and deserves, then, a sense of solidarity, brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition and respect. Democracy is geared toward participation and engagement, and that points to an educational system in which the fullest development of all is seen as the necessary condition for the full development of each, and conversely, that the fullest development of each is necessary for the full development of all.

In a vibrant and participatory democracy, we might conclude that whatever the wisest and most privileged parents want for their children is precisely the baseline and standard for what the wider community wants for all of its children. If children of privilege get to have small classes, abundant resources, and a curriculum based on opportunities to experiment and explore, ask questions and pursue answers to the furthest limit, if the Obama kids, for example, attend such a school, one where they also find a respected and unionized teacher corps, shouldn’t that be good enough for the kids in public schools everywhere? Any other ideal for our schools, in John Dewey’s words, “is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy.”

We want our students to be able to think for themselves, to make judgments based on evidence and argument, to develop minds of their own. We want them to ask fundamental questions—who in the world am I? How did I get here and where am I going? What in the world are my choices? How in the world shall I proceed?—and to pursue answers wherever they might take them. Our efforts focus not on the production of things so much as on the production of fully developed human beings who are capable of controlling and transforming their own lives, citizens who can participate fully in civic life.

Teaching in a democracy encourages students to develop initiative and imagination, the capacity to name the world, to identify the obstacles to their full humanity, and the courage to act upon whatever the known demands. Education in a democracy is always about opening doors and opening minds as students forge their own pathways into a wider world.

How do our schools at every level—K-16—measure up to the democratic ideal?

Much of what we call schooling forecloses or shuts down or walls off meaningful choice-making. Much of it is based on obedience and conformity, the hallmarks of every authoritarian regime. Much of it banishes the unpopular, squirms in the presence of the unorthodox, hides the unpleasant. There’s no space for skepticism, irreverence, or even doubt. While many long for an education that is transcendent and powerful, we find ourselves too-often locked in situations that reduce schooling to a kind of glorified clerking that passes along a curriculum of received wisdom and predigested and often false bits of information. This is a recipe for disaster in the long run.

Educators, students, and citizens must press for an education worthy of a democracy, including an end to sorting people into winners and losers through expensive standardized tests which act as pseudo-scientific forms of surveillance; an end to starving public schools—including public higher education—of needed resources and then blaming teachers for dismal outcomes; and an end to the rapidly accumulating “educational debt,” the resources due to communities historically segregated, under-funded and under-served. All children and youth in a democracy, regardless of economic circumstance, deserve full access to richly-resourced classrooms led by caring, qualified and generously compensated teachers.
We might try now to create open spaces in our schools and our various communities where we expect fresh and startling winds to blow, unaccustomed winds that are sure to electrify and confound and fascinate us. We begin by throwing open the windows. We declare that in this corner of this place—in this open space we are constructing together—people will begin to experience themselves as powerful authors of their own narratives, actors in their own dramas, the essential architects and creators of their own lives, participants in a dynamic and inter-connected community-in-the-making. Here they will discover a zillion ways to articulate their own desires and demands and questions. Here everyone will live in search of rather than in accordance with or in accommodation to. Here we will join one another and our democratic futures can be born.

A primary job of teachers and scholars and journalists, and a responsibility of all engaged citizens, is to challenge orthodoxy, dogma, and mindless complacency, to be skeptical of all authoritative claims, to interrogate and trouble the given and the taken-for-granted. The growth of knowledge, insight, and understanding depends on that kind of effort, and the inevitable clash of ideas that follows must be nourished and not crushed.

As campuses contract and constrain, the main victims becomes truth, honesty, integrity, curiosity, imagination, freedom itself. When college campuses fall silent, other victims include the high school history teacher on the west side of Chicago or in Laramie or Cheyenne, the English literature teacher in Detroit, or the math teacher in an Oakland middle school. They and countless others immediately get the message: be careful what you say; stay close to the official story; stick to the authorized text; keep quiet with your head covered.

In Brecht’s play Galileo the great astronomer set forth into a world dominated by a mighty church and an authoritarian power: “The cities are narrow and so are the brains,” he declared recklessly. Intoxicated with his own insights, Galileo found himself propelled toward revolution. Not only did his radical discoveries about the movement of the stars free them from the “crystal vault” that received truth insistently claimed fastened them to the sky, but his insights suggested something even more dangerous: that we, too, are embarked on a great voyage, that we are free and without the easy support that dogma provides. Here Galileo raised the stakes and risked taking on the establishment in the realm of its own authority, and it struck back fiercely. Forced to renounce his life’s work under the exquisite pressure of the Inquisition, he denounced what he knew to be true, and was welcomed back into the church and the ranks of the faithful, but exiled from humanity—by his own word. A former student confronted him in the street then: “Many on all sides followed you…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.”

This is surely in play today: the right to talk to whomever you please, the right to read and wonder, the right to pursue an argument into uncharted spaces, the right to challenge the state or the church and its orthodoxy in the public square. The right to think at all.

This is some of what I would have discussed in Wyoming, but that will not happen, at least not this week. Canceling this talk underlines the urgency of having multiple and far-ranging speeches, dialogue, and discussions at every level and throughout the public square.

Pity the poor imperialists. Brimming with self-serving justifications–we come in peace, we stand for freedom, we represent a better way–and sporting those confident smiles, they invade and occupy a distant land, and meet, to their never-ending surprise, resentment and resistance at every turn. The pattern is always the same: they install a puppet regime that acts as the initial justification for their presence, and in the blink of an eye, the puppet is found to be inadequate and expendable. He is then criticized, demonized, and finally removed, overthrown, or shot (remember Diem!). So it is in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It would be interesting if the New York Times, for example, had an editorial writer who knew or could honestly draw on history, or who wasn’t tethered to a desk in the US State Department. We might have been spared the editorial on April 3, “President Karzai Lashes Out.” His “rambling speech” is “delusional,” for he doesn’t seem to see that the US is focused on “protecting and improving the lives of Afghan civilians as well as on defeating the Taliban.” When Karzai says the US is on the verge of becoming invaders, the Times alerts us all that he has entered “hazardous territory.” In case Karzai himself misses the point, the editorial warns that Washington can always “work around him if needed'” and that his future may well be doomed.
Of course we can’t really expect journalists to have much perspective in the United States of Amnesia, but a short eight years ago, when Karzai was installed with noisy proclamations and celebration, a host of thoughtful commentators said it would necessarily come to this.
And so it has, without a word of self-criticism.

A front page headline in the New York Times on March 7, 1970 announced: “Townhouse Razed by Blast and Fire; Man’s Body Found.” The story described an elegant four-story brick building in Greenwich Village destroyed by three large explosions and a raging fire “probably caused by leaking gas” at about noon on Friday, March 6.

The body was later identified as belonging to 23-year old Ted Gold, a leader of the 1968 student strike at Columbia University, a teacher, and a member of a “militant faction of Students for a Democratic Society.” Over the next several days two more bodies were discovered—Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins had both been student leaders, civil rights and anti-war activists—and by March 15 the Times reported that police had found “57 sticks of dynamite, four homemade pipe bombs and about thirty blasting caps in the rubble,” and referred to the townhouse for the first time as a “bomb factory.” That awful event announced widely the existence of the Weather Underground, in some ways the most notorious, but far from the only group of Americans to take up armed struggle as a protest tool at that moment—the story took off from there, growing, changing, and accelerating every day

A few days after the Townhouse explosion Ralph Featherstone and William “Che” Payne, two “black militants,” associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, according to Time magazine, “were killed when their car was blasted to bits” by a bomb police said was being transported to Washington D.C. to protest the prosecution of SNCC leader H. Rap Brown. The Black Liberation Army leapt onto the national scene, and other organized groups—Puerto Rican independistas, Native American first nation militants, and Chicano separatists— emerged demanding self-determination and justice.

Violent resistance to violence was far from an isolated phenomenon: Time noted that in 1969 there had been 61 bombings on college campuses, most targeting ROTC and other  war-related targets, and 93 bomb explosions in New York, half of them classified as political,” a category that was “virtually non-existent ten years ago.” According to the FBI, from the start of 1969 to mid-April 1970, there were 40,934 bombings, attempted bombings, and bomb threats. Out of this total, 975 had been explosive, as opposed to incendiary, attacks, meaning that on average, two bombs planned, constructed, and placed, detonated every day for more than a year. Our national history includes times of anarchist resistance, labor militancy, massive unreported (and still largely unacknowledged) slave rebellions, and the armed abolitionism of John Brown; the late 1960’s and 1970’s was becoming one of those times.

How had it come to this?

Empire, invasion, and occupation always earn blow-back. In 1965 most Americans supported the war, but by 1968 people had turned massively against it—the result of protest and organizing and a burgeoning peace movement, and of civil rights leaders like the militants from SNCC, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King, Jr. denouncing the war as illegal and immoral. Even more important, veterans came home and told the truth about the reality of aggression and occupation and war crimes. The US government found itself isolated around the world and in profound and growing conflict with its own people inside its own borders. The Vietnamese themselves were decisive: they refused to be defeated. The Tet Offensive in 1968 destroyed any fantasy of an American victory, and when President Lyndon Johnson announced at the end of March, 1968 that he would not run for re-election, it seemed to us we had won a victory.

But peace proved to be a dream deferred, for the war did not end—it escalated into an air and sea war, expanded into all of Cambodia and Laos, and every week the war dragged on another six thousand people were murdered in Southeast Asia. Six thousand human beings—massive, unthinkable numbers—were thrown into the furnaces of war and death that had been constructed by our own government. The war was lost, but the terror continued. All Vietnamese territories outside US control were declared “free-fire zones” and airplanes rained bombs and napalm on anything that moved, destroying crops and live-stock and entire villages. John McCain, an unremorseful war criminal, flew some of those missions. As a young lieutenant, John Kerry testified in Senate hearings at the time that US troops committed war crimes every day as a matter of policy, not choice.

No one knew precisely how to proceed, for the anti-war movement had done what it had set out to do—we’d persuaded the American people to oppose the war, built a massive movement and a majority peace sentiment—and still we couldn’t find any sure-fire way to stop the killing; millions of people mobilized for peace, and our project, our task and our obsession, was so simple to state, so excruciatingly difficult to achieve: peace now. The war slogged on into a murky and unacceptable future, and the anti-war forces splintered then—some of us tried to organize a peace wing within the Democratic Party, others organized in factories and work-places, some fled to Europe or Africa or Canada, others to communes, the land, and hopeful but small organizing projects. Some began to build a vehicle to fight the war-makers by other means, a clandestine force that would, we hoped, survive what we thought of as an impending American totalitarianism. Every choice was contemplated, each seemed a possibility then—and we had friends and family in every camp—and no choice seemed utterly beyond the pale.

The Weather Underground carried out a series of illegal and symbolic attacks on property then, some 20 acts over its entire existence, and no one was killed or harmed; the goal was not to terrorize people, but to scream out the message that the US government and its military were committing acts of terrorism in our name, and that the American people should never tolerate that. Some felt that our actions were misguided at best, off-the-tracks, indefensible and even despicable, and that case is not impossible to make. But America’s longest war itself, with all its attendant horrors, was doubly despicable, and while many stood up, who in fact did the right thing; who ended the war; who transformed the world?

We began to think of ourselves as part of the Third World project—revolutionary liberation movements demanding justice and freeing themselves from empire, we believed, would also transform the world. We thought that we who lived in the metropolis of empire had a special duty to “oppose our own imperialism” and to resist our own government’s imperial dreams. Eventually we came to think that we could make a revolution, and that in any case it was our responsibility to try. It was a big stretch, but every revolution is impossible until it occurs; after the fact, every revolution seems inevitable.

All of that was forty years ago—lots of water under the bridge since then, raging rivers and cascading falls, rapids and torrents, chutes and ladders—a long time in the life of a person—the young become the old, and stories get retold. But it’s also a matter of perspective: the meaning of any historical event will always be contested, and the more recent the event, the fiercer the contestation. The last word has not been written about the radical movements of youth in Europe in 1968, and certainly the meaning of the Black Freedom Movement or of the US invasion and occupation of Viet Nam and the various American reactions to that catastrophe—from mindless jingoism to sincere patriotism, from reluctant participation to gung-ho brutality, from protest to armed resistance—are far from settled. We’re reminded of the Chinese premier Chou En Lai responding to a French journalist’s question many years ago about the impact of the 18^th Century French revolution on the 20^th Century Chinese revolution. He thought for quite awhile and finally said, “It’s too soon to tell.” Forty years is less than the blink of an eye.

The big wheel keeps on turning: events and actions and adventures plunge relentlessly forward and nothing withstands the whirlwind of life on-the-move and history in-the-making. No single narrative can ever adequately speak to the diversity and complexity of human experience, for meaning itself is in the mix, always contested and never easily settled. Because meaning is made and remade in the present tense, our backward glances are now necessarily refracted through the US defeat in Viet Nam, the steady decline of empire, the hollowing out of the economy through militarism, the destruction of our political system, the environmental catastrophe that capitalism wrought, the terror attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent invasions and occupations and wars that continue as defining features of our national life. There is no sturdy accounting of distant times: everything must change, no one and nothing remains the same.

Many who knew and loved them 40 years ago, choose to remember Ted Gold, Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, Ralph Featherstone, and Che Payne every day as beautiful and committed young people who believed fiercely in peace and justice and freedom, believed further that all men and women are of incalculable value, and thought that they had a personal and urgent responsibility to act on that deep belief. We think of Brecht: a smile is a kind of indifference to injustice. And then we turn to Rosa Luxemburg writing to a friend from prison: love your own life enough to care for the children and the elderly, to enjoy a good meal and a beautiful sunset, to embrace friends and lovers; and love the world enough to put your shoulder on history’s great wheel when required.

We have not forgotten our fallen friends, not for a moment. March 6 is for us a time of more formal remembrance. Their deaths and all that followed offered us an opportunity to reconsider and recover. We were able to recommit and to see that the first casualty of making oneself into an instrument of war is always one’s own humanity, that, in the words of the poet Marge Piercy, “conscience is the sword we wield. Conscience is the sword that runs us through.” We remember our lost comrades, their many brave, as well as their damaging last acts, and we continue to vibrate with the hope and despair they embodied then.

Bill Ayers  Bernardine Dohrn

Carlo Rotella’s flattering portrait of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (“Class Warrior,” the New Yorker, February 1, 2010) claims that in today’s school reform battles “there are, roughly speaking, two major camps.” The first he calls “the free-market reformers,” the second, “the liberal traditionalists.” This unfortunate caricature leaves out a huge range of approaches and actors, including people Rotella himself interviewed for his story (Diane Ravitch, Tim Knowles, Kenneth Saltman). Most notably it omits those who argue, as John Dewey did, that in a democracy, whatever the wisest and most privileged parents want for their children must serve as a baseline standard for what the community wants for all of its children. Rotella notes that Duncan as well as the Obama children attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (as did our three sons), where they had small classes, abundant resources, and opportunities to experiment and explore, ask questions and pursue answers to the furthest limits. Oh, and a respected and unionized teacher corps as well. Good enough for the Obamas and Duncans, good enough for the kids in public schools everywhere. Any other ideal for our schools, in Dewey’s words, “is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy.”

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Goodbye to politics as arid, dry, self-referencing and self-satisfied. Goodbye to star wars and inner wars. Goodbye to deference, didacticism, ego, and complacency in a heartless world. Goodbye to prisons and border guards and walls—whether in Palestine or in Texas—and goodbye to quarantines, deletions, and closures of all kinds. Goodbye to all that.
I resolve to create new spaces overflowing with life, crackling with the surprising and contradictory harmonies of love, stunning in their embodied hope for a better world; to step into the unknown, to jump off the edge, to dance the dialectic; to welcome the new and the now, to learn how to live again and how to love anew; to nurture relentless curiosity, simple acts of kindness, the vast complexity of humanity, the wild unruly convergence, the poetics of resistance, and the wonder of it all.
I resolve to embrace a new world in the making, planetary peace and inner peace, and I resolve, each day in every way, to vote for love—all kinds of love for all kinds of people in all kinds of circumstances and situations.

Of course I would have loved to have seen Linda Darling-Hammond become Secretary of Education in an Obama administration. She’s smart, honest, compassionate and courageous, and perhaps most striking, she actually knows schools and classrooms, curriculum and teaching, kids and child development. These have never counted for much as qualifications for the post, of course, and yet they offer a neat contrast with the four failed urban school superintendents–Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Paul Valas, and Arne Duncan–who were for weeks rumored to be her chief competition.

These four, like George W. Bush’s Secretary of Education, Rod Paige of the fraudulent Texas-miracle, have little to show in terms of school improvement beyond a deeply dishonest public relations narrative. Teacher accountability, relentless standardized testing, school closings, and privatization—this is what the dogmatists and true-believers of the right call “reform.” Michelle Rhee of Washington D.C., the most ideologically-driven of the bunch, warranted a cover story in Time in early December called “How to Fix America’s Schools” in which she was praised for making more changes in a year and a half on the job than other school leaders, “even reform-minded ones,” make in five: closing 21 schools (15% of the total), firing 100 central office personnel, 270 teachers, and 36 principals. These are all policy moves that are held on faith to stand for improvement; not a word on kids’ learning or engagement with schools, not even a nod at evidence that might connect these moves with student progress. But of course evidence is always the enemy of dogma, and this is faith-based, fact-free school policy at its purest.

So I would have picked Darling-Hammond, but then again I would have picked Noam Chomsky for state, Naomi Klein for defense, Bernardine Dohrn for Attorney General, Bill Fletcher for commerce, James Thindwa for labor, Barbara Ransby for human services, Paul Krugman for treasury, and Amy Goodman for press secretary. So what do I know?

Darling-Hammond would not have been a smart pick for Obama. She was steadily demonized in a concerted campaign to undermine her effectiveness, and she would surely have had great difficulty getting any traction whatsoever for progressive policy change in this environment. Arne Duncan was the smart choice, the unity choice—the least driven by ideology, the most open to working with teachers and unions, the smartest by a mile– and let’s wish him well.

But there’s a deeper point: since the Obama victory, many people seem to be suffering a kind of post-partum depression: unable to find any polls to obsess over, we read the tea-leaves and try to penetrate the president-elect’s mind. What do his moves portend? What magic or disaster awaits us? With due respect, this is a matter of looking entirely in the wrong direction.

Obama is not a monarch— Arne Duncan is not education czar– and we are not his subjects. If we want a foreign policy based on justice, for example, we ought to get busy organizing a robust anti-imperialist peace movement; if we want to end the death penalty we better get smart about changing the dominant narrative concerning crime and punishment. We are not allowed to sit quietly in a democracy awaiting salvation from above. We are all equal, and we all need to speak up and speak out right now.

During Arne Duncan’s tenure in Chicago, a group of hunger-striking mothers organized city-wide support and won the construction of a new high school in a community that had been underserved and denied for years. Another group of parents, teachers, and students mobilized to push military recruiters out of their high school; Duncan didn’t support them and he certainly didn’t lead the charge, but they won anyway. If they’d waited for Duncan to act they’d likely be waiting still. Teachers at another school refused to give one of the endless standardized tests, arguing that this was one test too many, and they organized deep support for their protest; Duncan didn’t support them either, but they won anyway. If they’d waited for Duncan, they’d be waiting still. Why would anyone sit around waiting for Arne now? Stop whining; get busy.

In the realm of education, there is nothing preventing any of us from pressing to change the dominant discourse that has controlled the discussion for many years. It’s reasonable to assume that education in a democracy is distinct from education under a dictatorship or a monarchy, but how? Surely school leaders in fascist Germany or communist Albania or medieval Saudi Arabia all agreed, for example, that students should behave well, stay away from drugs and crime, do their homework, study hard, and master the subject matters, so those things don’t differentiate a democratic education from any other.

What makes education in a democracy distinct is a commitment to a particularly precious and fragile ideal, and that is a belief that the fullest development of all is the necessary condition for the full development of each; conversely, the fullest development of each is necessary for the full development of all.

Democracy, after all, is geared toward participation and engagement, and it’s based on a common faith: every human being is of infinite and incalculable value, each a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, and creative force. Every human being is born free and equal in dignity and rights, each is endowed with reason and conscience, and deserves, then, a sense of solidarity, brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition and respect.

We want our students to be able to think for themselves, to make judgments based on evidence and argument, to develop minds of their own. We want them to ask fundamental questions—Who in the world am I? How did I get here and where am I going? What in the world are my choices? How in the world shall I proceed? — and to pursue answers wherever they might take them. Democratic educators focus their efforts, not on the production of things so much as on the production of fully developed human beings who are capable of controlling and transforming their own lives, citizens who can participate fully in civic life.

Democratic teaching encourages students to develop initiative and imagination, the capacity to name the world, to identify the obstacles to their full humanity, and the courage to act upon whatever the known demands. Education in a democracy should be characteristically eye-popping and mind-blowing—always about opening doors and opening minds as students forge their own pathways into a wider world.

How do our schools here and now measure up to the democratic ideal?

Much of what we call schooling forecloses or shuts down or walls off meaningful choice-making. Much of it is based on obedience and conformity, the hallmarks of every authoritarian regime. Much of it banishes the unpopular, squirms in the presence of the unorthodox, hides the unpleasant. There’s no space for skepticism, irreverence, or even doubt. While many of us long for teaching as something transcendent and powerful, we find ourselves too-often locked in situations that reduce teaching to a kind of glorified clerking, passing along a curriculum of received wisdom and predigested and often false bits of information. This is a recipe for disaster in the long run.

Educators, students, and citizens must press now for an education worthy of a democracy, including an end to sorting people into winners and losers through expensive standardized tests which act as pseudo-scientific forms of surveillance; an end to starving schools of needed resources and then blaming teachers and their unions for dismal outcomes; and an end to the rapidly accumulating “educational debt,” the resources due to communities historically segregated, under-funded and under-served. All children and youth in a democracy, regardless of economic circumstance, deserve full access to richly-resourced classrooms led by caring, qualified and generously compensated teachers. So let’s push for that, and let’s make it happen before Arne Duncan or anyone else grants us permission.

By JUDY GUMBO ALBERT

We are forces of chaos and anarchy
Everything they say we are, we are
And we are very
Proud of ourselves.

–Jefferson Airplane, We Can Be Together

This is the inside story of how my late husband Stew Albert and I became prime suspects in CAPBOM, which is the FBI codename for the 1971 Weather Underground bombing of the United States Capitol Building in Washington D.C. Sarah Palin and her cohort of extreme right-wing really, really scary people used the Capitol bombing to link President-elect Obama with the not nearly as scary 1960s Weatherman and 1997 Chicago Citizen of the Year Bill Ayres. At the time, my widely quoted take on the Capitol bombing was: “We didn’t do it, but we dug it.”

As a former 60’s protestor, celebrating with everyone else the results of this historic election, I’d like to give my personal point of view about the attacks on the 1960s that were made during the campaign – specifically “guilt by association” and “domestic terrorism.” And also to reflect a bit on how I feel about those issues today.

Wrong Place, Right Time

In the spring of 1971, on the day the Capitol bombing takes place, I’m living in our nation’s capital organizing an anti-war demonstration. Along with Stew, Abbie and Anita Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, his girlfriend Nancy Kurshan and satiric journalist Paul Krassner, I’m an original Yippie. Yippies believe in the politics of theatre. We call ourselves Groucho Marxists and use comedy to turn serious issues on their head. We’re cultural revolutionaries who raise political awareness by having as much fun and getting as much media attention as we can. We’re a youth movement who doesn’t believe in hierarchy: every Yippie is her or his own leader. Our favorite Bob Dylan mantra is: Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and FederalReserve Chairman Ben Bernanke are not the first to throw money at Wall Street. In the spring of 1968, Abbie, Jerry and the rest of us stopped trading on the New York Stock exchange when we threw $1 and $5 bills at greedy stockbrokers who grabbed at the money floating down from a balcony. Yippies brought the New York Stock Exchange to a halt for a mere $250.

By the summer of 1968, at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, we’re running a pig named Pigasus for president as a send-up to protest the election and an unjust and illegal Vietnam War. In what is to become an iconic American moment, 15,000 of us — Yippies, mainstream anti-war demonstrators, the media and even a member of the British Parliament — are severely gassed and beaten by the Chicago police.

But three years later, by the time of the Capitol bombing, it’s becoming more and more difficult to find the fun in protest. All of us in the anti-war movement are frustrated by the seemingly endless parade of atrocities being committed in Vietnam, which we see in living color at home on TV every night, and a recent campaign of deadly, intense carpet-bombing in Laos.

The Mayday Tribe

I’m staying temporarily in Washington DC, in a collective house at 2226 M Street.

Chicago Conspiracy 8 defendant and anti-war activist Rennie Davis, and at least 30 others live in the surrounding neighborhood. The M Street house is situated directly across the street from a red-brick fire station that, in addition to fire-trucks, is outfitted with surveillance cameras so overtly visible in the front window that I occasionally lead a group of us out front just to dance and wave at the cameras.

We call ourselves the Mayday Tribe. Our name – Mayday — is intended to convey an urgent distress call about the war to the American people and motivate protestors to come to a demonstration scheduled for three months later. We’re putting together a People’s Peace Treaty on behalf of the American public to draw attention to the Nixon administration’s obdurate refusal to make peace. Our admittedly utopian demonstration slogan states: “If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.”

We predict thousands of people will take to the streets and block traffic to protest the war and this recent escalation in bombing.

At my initiation, Stew and I have officially broken off our two-year-old romance. As I recall, I feel fine. Liberated in fact. I have no qualms about publicly labeling Stew an arrogant, patronizing, sexist, male chauvinist pig, which, looking back on it, was about 35% true, and 65% women’s movement PC rhetoric. Besides, we’re still on speaking terms. I realize he’s lonely without me and know I can still get him to do almost anything I want, so I ask him to come and visit from New York and bring with him, on the plane, a large satchel of high quality marijuana donated to the cause by a sympathetic New York City lawyer. I’m trying to lighten things up by introducing some traditional Yippie medicinals into our ultra-serious organizing effort.

The Day of the Bombing

Early in the morning of Monday March 1, the M Street phone rings. We’re told that members of the Weather Underground, originally known as Weatherman, (from Bob Dylan’s prophetic mantra “You don’t need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows”) are taking credit for placing a bomb in an out-of-the-way men’s bathroom. The Weathermen say:

We have attacked the Capitol because it is, along with the White House and the Pentagon, the worldwide symbol of the government which is now attacking Indochina.

When I first hear this news, I feel exhilarated. Irrationally exuberant in fact. My reaction is documented by an unknown person, possibly an informant who, in a later legal affidavit, describes me and the others in M Street as “exultant” – which is not so far removed from my own recollection. But why, you quite rightly ask — and I ask myself the same question — did I feel so positive about this act — especially when placing a bomb is something I could never do – or did – myself?

As an anti-war activist, I considered dissent to be patriotic. Still do. At the time of the bombing, I felt like I was rooting for David in the face of Goliath. I saw the Weathermen as courageous enough to take the lead in our very own, 60’s style Boston Tea Party. In my view, they blew up a U.S. Capitol bathroom on my behalf and on behalf of the entire anti-war movement. And I appreciated that they did so for the most compelling of reasons — to stop the endless, brutal killing war in Vietnam and Laos. Which is why I could, in good conscience, make the statement: “We didn’t do it, but we dug it.”

Hands Up!

Immediately after the bombing, M-street house surveillance intensifies. Firemen swarm. Burly new guys start hanging around outside the firehouse. They don’t look and weren’t even dressed like firemen. Stew and Leslie Bacon, a young, anti-war activist friend, decide to take a walk to Lafayette Park, directly in front of the White House. Beyond the macho of it, I can’t speculate about Stew’s motives. Most likely I disapproved because, at that particular moment in our on-again, off-again relationship, almost anything he said or did was enough to provoke my disapproval.

As the tension-filled, day-after-bombing dragged on, it became increasingly clear to me that there was no time like the present to get the hell out of Dodge.

Leslie chooses to remain in DC. I grab Stew, Colin and Michael, two other M Street residents, plus a couple of bags of clothing and we hop into my 1969 dark blue VW Beetle named “Lindequist.” (When I bought the car I found the previous owner’s name “Lindequist”, inscribed on the dashboard; I currently drive Lindequist 3.) A few blocks into our getaway I realize I’ve forgotten my all-time favorite hat – a fisherman’s cap made out of fluffy brown Canadian beaver pelts with a brown leather front brim. Stew and I immediately get into a huge fight. Stew, the pragmatist, now recognizes the wisdom of leaving town as quickly as possible. I, the Yippie fashionista, will not leave my favorite hat to the mercy of the pigs. It’s my car, I’m the driver: we circle back. I run in, save my hat and, Keystone Cops like, we once again beat a retreat. There’s no PETA yet to make my hat a political issue.

But in the early evening, just we’ve reached the outskirts of Baltimore, I suddenly notice flashing lights behind me. I pull Lindequist over and hear a loud, gruff male voice coming over a loudspeaker “get out of the car with your hands up.” Shotguns at our heads, the four of us are quickly spread eagled against the VW. Colin is shaking so hard I think he might pee himself – but he doesn’t. The boys are put in one police car; I’m alone in another for what feels like hours. I’m buzzy with adrenaline and really bored sitting alone in my personal Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome cage. I can’t see much except cops and the boys’ heads in front of me in the other car, so all I can do is bite my nails and obsess. Lindequist and the satchels are thoroughly searched. Eventually we are released and, in true Yippie absurdist fashion, are given a ticket for a bald tire by a local highway patrolman who signs his name James Bond

We’re not Weathermen. It literally didn’t occur to me we were being stopped because of the Capitol Bombing. I am really grateful we left the marijuana back in DC.

What Happens to Leslie

Five days before Mayday, on April 28, Leslie, who at the time is 19 years old, is arrested in Washington D.C. by the FBI and appears a few days later before Judge John Sirica, later of Watergate fame. Leslie is taken to a Seattle hotel where she is held captive in a room for weeks, with no access to family or friends, only to lawyers. She is questioned harshly about the Capitol bombing but there’s nothing she can tell them because there’s nothing she knows. On May 1, the Weathermen make public a communiqué addressed to Leslie’s mother:

Your confidence in Leslie is justified because she is completely innocent of any involvement in the bombing of the US Capitol. We know this for a fact because, as the FBI and Justice Department well know, our organization did the bombing.

Leslie said to me recently that her mother, an upscale, conservative, California homemaker, told the national and international press staking out their Atherton home:

I don’t see why everyone is so upset about someone blowing up a building when the government is blowing up people.

Standard operating procedure for FBI agents and prosecutors, then and now, is to target young women who they consider potential “weak links” in an evidentiary chain and most likely to give up information. These young women become their special victims. I’ve come to believe that Leslie’s kidnapping, imprisonment and resulting unwanted national media attention, was the moral equivalent of a rape. The federal prosecutor and the FBI violated a 19 year old woman’s trust and privacy, and, even though today Leslie is teacher and grandmother, this incident still poisons her sense of security and well- being.

Facing My Fear

I learned at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 that, when you’re in a true “face your fear” moment, you need to take action. Don’t delay. Don’t procrastinate. Don’t over think the consequences. By facing your fear, you can discover inside yourself the courage to take your life – and your freedom — into your own hands.

This is one such moment. My mantra serves me well. By the time I drop Stew off in New York City, check in with the marijuana-donating lawyer for free legal advice, and drive back home to Boston, I’ve talked myself into believing I’ve emerged from this incident shaken but unbowed.

In Boston, as my FBI files later reveal, agents have evicted my next door neighbor and ensconced themselves in an adjoining apartment. A group of Boston women, me included, take over a building at 888 Mass. Ave and turn it into a women’s center. The takeover becomes a springboard for the women’s demonstration that preceded Mayday — the April 10 Women’s March on the Pentagon.

The march attracts no more than 500 women — but the contingent I lead marches under a beautiful purple Janis Joplin banner.

Monday May 3, 1971 — Mayday

Our Mayday demonstration doesn’t stop the war – or the government.

The day before the demonstration, rock concert permits are cancelled. Police, reprising Chicago 1968, and presaging the 2008 Republican Convention, teargas as many demonstrators as they can; they destroy tents and use other coercive tactics to force protestors to leave a day early. Many do.

The remaining demonstrators begin assembling at 6 a.m. When it’s time to get up, I make a strategic decision, based purely on personal sloth, to let myself and my Boston affinity group sleep in — we’d been smoking too much of that dope and partying the night before. By the time we arrive downtown, streets are empty. Traffic is flowing smoothly. Stew and Abbie are among 7,000 demonstrators already arrested and locked up in an emergency detention center next to RFK stadium. Some claim Mayday is the largest mass arrest in U.S. history.

For me, Mayday is a bust. No pun intended. And it’s my own fault.

My failure of leadership is what my new fiancé David calls an AFOG – another f—-g opportunity for growth. It’s a harsh lesson that stays with me: don’t wimp out just before the end is in sight. Follow through on your commitment. No excuses. And never, ever smoke really strong dope the night before a big demo. Duh.

Guilt By Association

Three weeks after Mayday, Stew receives his subpoena to a Grand Jury investigating the Capitol bombing. He burns it publicly in New Haven to support Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale, who is on trial there at the time.

I receive my Grand Jury subpoena in Boston a few days after Stew. Why me? Perhaps no-one got the memo that Stew and I had broken up. Or perhaps the FBI was pissed about my arrogant, fuck you dance in front of the cameras on M-Street’s front porch. Or maybe the Feds just wanted to “round up the usual suspects.”

The eminence gris federal prosecutor responsible for all grand juries investigating Weather Underground bombings is a smartly dressed, slick-haired man named Guy Goodwin. Goodwin also convened a grand jury to investigate another equally false allegation — that Rev. Phil Berrigan and Elizabeth McAllister, a nun, are plotting to kidnap President Nixon’s evil national security advisor Henry Kissinger. He harassed Vietnam Veterans Against the War so much that, in 1972, they filed a $1.8 million civil suit against him.

My first response to my Grand Jury subpoena is to go numb. I’m facing a possible 20 year sentence. My “face your fear” mantra just doesn’t cut it. Denial works a whole lot better. Stew writes that I:
buried the great fear deep in her soul and beamed smiles that would bounce off the moon…but underneath the smiles, Judy was truly terrified. Even though we had officially parted, I knew that I still loved her, which meant that I had to look out for her so that, as a strange Canadian in a stranger America she would not come to harm.

On a PBS interview all I can say about being subpoenaed is: “It’s annoying. Uncool. But our lawyers will take care of it. Nothing to worry about.” Perhaps it’s a positive thing I grew up in a dysfunctional, alcoholic family – repression and denial are terrific short-term survival techniques for really tough times.

We Didn’t Do It But….

Pretty soon my inner Yippie re-emerges and my “face your fear” mantra kicks in. Stew and I decide the appropriate Yippie response is to hold a press conference in front of the Capitol Building.

Stew invites Jerry Rubin along for both his expertise and moral support. Abbie and Jerry believed passionately in the 1960s communications guru Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that the medium is the message — which led them to measure their success by how much media coverage they got and how frequently they got it. For all the time I knew them, and up until their deaths, a defining aspect of the Abbie/Jerry relationship was their constant competition with each other for the media spotlight. Manipulating the media to expose establishment hypocrisy was a primary Yippie value.

I paint my forehead with a Weather Underground Rainbow, cover one cheek with a woman’s symbol, the other with an NLF (otherwise known as Viet Cong) flag and I put a green marijuana leaf on my chin. And yes, that is a cigarette I’m smoking in the photo – I quit for good a few years later. In my press statement I quote a Weatherman communiqué that says:

The Weather Underground bombed the Capitol to bring a smile and a wink to all the kids in America who hate their government.

Then I pull off my 15 minutes of fame by adding: We didn’t do it but we dug it.

It’s obvious to me, almost 40 years later, that Sarah Palin did a remarkable job getting global media attention for Bill Ayres and his associational link to the Capitol bombing – way better than Billy, the Weather Underground, Stew, Jerry or I ever accomplished at the time. If Palin wasn’t a neo-fascist, I might consider giving her a Yippie Excellence in Media Manipulation award.

In the time immediately preceding our Grand Jury appearances, Stew and I are so overtly hostile to each other that we become famously difficult to be around. Observers who witnessed what Stew and I came to call our “pussycat fights” – meow, hissssss, scratch, pose – are horrified. In the photograph with Colin, I can’t tell if I’m gazing at Stew adoringly, or whether I’m just about to yell at him for some real or imagined sexist act. It’s clear to me now that Stew and I needed to break up, intensely and publicly, to allow us to get back together with each other as full and equal partners. Which we did two years later — and remained together until Stew’s death on January 30, 2006.

In the summer of 1971, I arrive to make my one time appearance before the Grand Jury dressed like a witch and surrounded by a contingent of women. In fact I am a member of W.I.T.C.H. — an early New York City based women’s liberation group appropriately named the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. Back then, you could use the word terrorist in a joke and not be labeled unpatriotic.

I walk into an old, dimly lit New York City in my long witchy dress, alone but unintimidated. Two rows of older men and women, black and white, arms crossed, stare stonily at me. On our lawyers’ advice I refuse to testify. Instead I cite Constitutional Amendments 1, 4, 5, 6 and 9. These numbers are indelibly imprinted in my memory – although, as a Canadian, I was at the time a little fuzzy about what each Amendment actually stood for. But now I get it why America’s founders gave us freedom of speech and due process. It’s another reason I consider myself a patriot – just like Abbie and Anita who named their son America.

A few months after my Grand Jury appearance, our subpoenas are quashed — I assume because they can find no evidence of wrongdoing. That guard who claimed to Guy Goodwin he saw Stew at the Capitol building was either set-up, a liar or befuddled – or perhaps he conflated the historic Capitol building with Lafayette Park. It’s a huge relief. Guilt by association loses out to the real world. In the 1980s, in an act of true Yippie bravado, I buy a car with the proceeds of our successful lawsuit against the FBI and get for it a “CAPBOM’ license plate.

Reframing “Domestic Terrorism”

The recent media hysteria about the Capitol bombing has prompted me to revisit, if not re-consider, how I feel today about my long ago “didn’t do it, but dug it” statement. It’s one of those situations where I really miss Stew’s advice and counsel. What would Stewie say?

In the 1980s, shortly after Stew and I moved to Portland, Oregon, I was driving down a street and saw some picketers. My initial gut response is to identify with the protestors, to honk my horn in support, but as I get closer I realize they are anti-choice fanatics picketing what turns out to be the Planned Parenthood affiliate where I will later be employed. The anti-abortion fundamentalists and right-wing extremists – that same breed of bottom feeder who sent hundreds of e-mail death threats to Bill Ayres — have it all over the Weather Underground when it comes to domestic terrorism.

Lest we forget, just over a decade ago this country witnessed a horrific killing spree carried out by our very own, home grown American terrorists: in 1993, abortion provider Dr. David Gunn was assassinated; Dr. John Britton, another abortion provider, was shot in 1994; in that same year 25 year old Planned Parenthood receptionist Shannon Lowney and women’s clinic worker Leanne Nichols were murdered within hours of each other. In 1995, in the worst case of domestic terrorism this country has ever seen, right wing racist gun nut Timothy McVeigh and two of his “pals” killed 168 people including 19 children by setting a bomb in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. In 1998, an anti-choice fanatic killed abortion provider Dr. Barnett Slepian.

The Weathermen bombed bathrooms. They destroyed property. Which is why calling them “domestic terrorists” doesn’t resonate with me. In every case of a Weather Underground bombing there was an advance call warning people to get out of the building. The Weathermen who died were three of their own. Conflating Bill Ayres and the Capitol bombing with Osama Bin Laden’s terroristic destruction of the Twin Towers feels like an enormous truth stretch. It disrespects those who died.

I’m a widow. I’ve experienced the excruciating pain brought on by death of your loved one. I can’t condone action that results in the death of human beings.

In my humble opinion, members of the Weather Underground turned into purists who came to so completely idealize and romanticize the liberation struggles of anyone who was African-American, Vietnamese, or what we used to call “third world” that they fell into an uncritical objectification of violence for its own sake. Their stated doctrine of “lead by example,” resulted in groups attempting to imitate Weather tactics with devastating results. In 1970, an unaffiliated collective bombed the University of Wisconsin’s Army Math building, tragically killing a researcher. In the 1980s, a rogue splinter group that included former Weathermen killed a guard and two policemen in a disastrous, bungled robbery of a Brinks truck. Most of them are still in jail.

Personally, I feel this may be an appropriate moment for truth and reconciliation. Even if Henry Kissinger and surviving members of the Nixon war machine aren’t going to repent and atone for the enormous death and destruction they wreaked on Southeast Asia, I believe it’s time for former Weather Underground leaders to publicly acknowledge the collateral deaths, in addition to the deaths of their own comrades. And then they should be forgiven – and forgive themselves.

Judy Gumbo Albert is an original member of the 1960s countercultural anti-war group known as the Yippies. Judy is co- author of The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (Greenwood Press, 1984) and The Conspiracy Trial (Bobbs Merrill, 1970). For many years Judy was an award winning fundraiser for Planned Parenthood. She is currently living in Berkeley, California writing a memoir titled “Yippie Girl”. Her chapter about the Battle of Chicago, 1968 can be found at http://www.counterpunch.org/albert08282008.html.
Judy can be reached at yippiegirl@gmail.com.