Bill Ayers

On December 24, 1967 the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered this Christmas sermon in Ebenezer Baptist Church at Atlanta, Georgia. It was broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as the fifth and final part of the 1967 Massey Lecture Series. In it, Dr. King articulates his long-term vision of nonviolence as a path to world peace. As Marian Wright Edelman wrote in her foreword to The Trumpet of Conscience, the book in which the sermon is collected, “we have made much but far from enough progress in overcoming the tenacious national demons of racism, poverty, materialism, and militarism Dr. King repeatedly warned could destroy America and all of God’s creation.” King’s vision remains eerily prophetic for our troubled times.

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This Christmas season finds us a rather bewildered human race. We have neither peace within nor peace without. Everywhere paralyzing fears harrow people by day and haunt them by night. Our world is sick with war; everywhere we turn we see its ominous possibilities. And yet, my friends, the Christmas hope for peace and goodwill toward all men can no longer be dismissed as a kind of pious dream of some utopian. If we don’t have goodwill toward men in this world, we will destroy ourselves by the misuse of our own instruments and our own power. Wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete. There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the very destructive power of modern weapons of warfare eliminates even the possibility that war may any longer serve as a negative good. And so, if we assume that life is worth living, if we assume that mankind has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war—and so let us this morning explore the conditions for peace. Let us this morning think anew on the meaning of that Christmas hope: “Peace on Earth, Good Will toward Men.” And as we explore these conditions, I would like to and its strategy.

We have experimented with the meaning of nonviolence in our struggle for racial justice in the United States, but now the time has come for man to experiment with nonviolence in all areas of human conflict, and that means nonviolence on an international scale.

Now let me suggest first that if we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone; no nation can live alone, and as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in this world. Now the judgment of God is upon us, and we must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools.

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Now let me say, secondly, that if we are to have peace in the world, men and nations must embrace the nonviolent affirmation that ends and means must cohere. One of the great philosophical debates of history has been over the whole question of means and ends. And there have always been those who argued that the end justifies the means, that the means really aren’t important. The important thing is to get to the end, you see.

So, if you’re seeking to develop a just society, they say, the important thing is to get there, and the means are really unimportant; any means will do so long as they get you there—they may be violent, they may be untruthful means; they may even be unjust means to a just end. There have been those who have argued this throughout history. But we will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in process, and ultimately you can’t reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.

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Now let me say that the next thing we must be concerned about if we are to have peace on earth and goodwill toward men is the nonviolent affirmation of the sacredness of all human life. Every man is somebody because he is a child of God. And so when we say “Thou shalt not kill,” we’re really saying that human life is too sacred to be taken on the battlefields of the world. Man is more than a tiny vagary of whirling electrons or a wisp of smoke from a limitless smoldering. Man is a child of God, made in His image, and therefore must be respected as such. Until men see this everywhere, until nations see this everywhere, we will be fighting wars. One day somebody should remind us that, even though there may be political and ideological differences between us, the Vietnamese are our brothers, the Russians are our brothers, the Chinese are our brothers; and one day we’ve got to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. But in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile. In Christ there is neither male nor female. In Christ there is neither Communist nor capitalist. In Christ, somehow, there is neither bound nor free. We are all one in Christ Jesus. And when we truly believe in the sacredness of human personality, we won’t exploit people, we won’t trample over people with the iron feet of oppression, we won’t kill anybody.

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In 1963, on a sweltering August afternoon, we stood in Washington, D.C., and talked to the nation about many things. Toward the end of that afternoon, I tried to talk to the nation about a dream that I had had, and I must confess to you today that not long after talking about that dream I started seeing it turn into a nightmare. I remember the first time I saw that dream turn into a nightmare, just a few weeks after I had talked about it. It was when four beautiful, unoffending, innocent Negro girls were murdered in a church in Birmingham, Alabama. I watched that dream turn into a nightmare as I moved through the ghettos of the nation and saw my black brothers and sisters perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity, and saw the nation doing nothing to grapple with the Negroes’ problem of poverty. I saw that dream turn into a nightmare as I watched my black brothers and sisters in the midst of anger and understandable outrage, in the midst of their hurt, in the midst of their disappointment, turn to misguided riots to try to solve that problem. I saw that dream turn into a nightmare as I watched the war in Vietnam escalating, and as I saw so-called military advisers, 16,000 strong, turn into fighting soldiers until today over 500,000 American boys are fighting on Asian soil. Yes, I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes, but in spite of that I close today by saying I still have a dream, because, you know, you can’t give up in life. If you lose hope, somehow you lose that vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you to go on in spite of all. And so today I still have a dream.

I have a dream that one day men will rise up and come to see that they are made to live together as brothers. I still have a dream this morning that one day every Negro in this country, every colored person in the world, will be judged on the basis of the content of his character rather than the color of his skin, and every man will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. I still have a dream today that one day the idle industries of Appalachia will be revitalized, and the empty stomachs of Mississippi will be filled, and brotherhood will be more than a few words at the end of a prayer, but rather the first order of business on every legislative agenda. I still have a dream today that one day justice will roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream. I still have a dream today that in all of our state houses and city halls men will be elected to go there who will do justly and love mercy and walk humbly with their God. I still have a dream today that one day war will come to an end, that men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, that nations will no longer rise up against nations, neither will they study war any more. I still have a dream today that one day the lamb and the lion will lie down together and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid. I still have a dream today that one day every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill will be made low, the rough places will be made smooth and the crooked places straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. I still have a dream that with this faith we will be able to adjourn the councils of despair and bring new light into the dark chambers of pessimism. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when there will be peace on earth and goodwill toward men. It will be a glorious day, the morning stars will sing together, and the sons of God will shout for joy.

Happy Birthday, Bernardine Dohrn!
81 trips around the sun!
And–SURPRISE!–53 of them with me.
How did I get so lucky?
Still trying to figure it out.
Keep on.
xoxo

A new year and a new episode!

We’re back and excited to begin the discussion anew. This episode brings us a lively talk with Theodore Richards including some audience participation recorded at 57th St. Books. 

The brilliant novelist Russell Banks passed away a few days ago. He was a creative and radical thinker, a member of Students for a Democratic Society decades ago, and a founding member of the John Brown Lives! community in the Adirondacks. His novel about John Brown, Cloudsplitter, is essential reading. I want to hold up the last paragraph of his novel Continental Drift   as a fitting epitaph:

“Good cheer and mournfulness over lives other than our own, even wholly invented lives—no, especially wholly invented lives—deprive the world as it is of some of the greed it needs to continue to be itself. Sabotage and subversion, then, are this book’s objectives. Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.” 

Saddened to learn of the death of Norm Fruchter, an old comrade and friend.
I met Norm in the early 1960s—he had co-founded the Newark Community Union Project (NCUP) with Tom Hayden and other radical community organizers from Students for a Democratic Society, and I was organizing in a sister project, the East Side Community Union in Cleveland. Norm was a film-maker with the alternative group Newsreel, a novelist, a teacher, an activist, and a brilliant educational innovator.

He was an inspiration, he made the world a better place, and he was loved.

Thinking of Heather and his family now.

Rest in Power, Norm!

So long 2022!
Hello 2023, and whatever’s next!

I was thinking about a time years ago when I was arrested with countless others in a chaotic street-fight with the police on Michigan Avenue, and packed into a crowded police van rushing headlong toward Cook County Jail, I was full of energy and hope—in fact I felt a little ecstatic. We had not backed down, and we had not run away. We had stood up for peace and freedom, and we’d conveyed our urgent message to a vast audience. The whole world was watching that night, and in that dark and stuffy van, with a bloodied head, I felt myself breathing the refreshing air of freedom.
I think that experience reveals a paradox at the heart of freedom—we’re most free precisely when we’re in the act of naming an obstacle to our own (or our neighbor’s) full humanity—our freedom. That moment may appear obstructed or fraught or dangerous or troubling—and, in fact, it may be all of that. And yet, freedom heaves into view exactlywhen the brutal wall of unfreedom is identified—enslavement, subjugation, abuse, cruelty, persecution, exploitation, prison, oppression—and then opposed, shoulder-to-shoulder with others in an effort to prevail over unfreedom. Identifying and naming injustice, organizing and agitating against it in the company of comrades, breaching barricades and overcoming barriers—that’s where freedom explodes onto the scene and comes to life as three-dimensional, vivid, trembling, and real.
Frederick Douglass describes a moment when he refused to allow himself to be beaten by his master, and, risking death, fought back. Without any assurances of success, Douglass fought the man to a standoff and defended himself successfully—intentionally resisting the temptation to severely bloody or hurt the man. Amazingly Douglass was not punished. When he reflected on the encounter, Douglass wrote, “I was nothing before; I was a man now…After resisting him, I felt as I had never felt before. It was resurrection…I had reached the point where I was not afraid to die. This spirit made me a freeman in fact.When a slave cannot be flogged, he is more than half free.
Douglass had expressed himself openly, fully, and authentically; he had removed the servile mask of compliance. Through fighting back, he had openly named unfreedom, resisted it, and felt suddenly resurrected—exhilarated, intoxicated, energized. Although still enslaved, Douglass had tasted freedom.
This is my hope and my resolution for 2023: to breathe the air of freedom as often as possible by going into battle hand-in-hand with the Freedom Fighters.

Abolish the prisons!
Defund the police!
Build a world of joy and justice, peace and love for all!

In Our Lifetime: A birthday rhyme

Seventy-eight trips around the sun,

More to do—so much undone.

My 79th tour begins today,

I plan to work, to fight, to play.

Our deepening crises seek a far-reaching solution,

To start, let’s make an anarchist/socialist revolution.

OK, OK—I’m no poet. But the sentiment is real. I was born in 1944, at the dawn of what scientists who examine the timeline of the Earth—Precambrian, Paleozoic and so on and so on—now are calling the Anthropocene. This is the era characterized by dramatic human-induced, planetary-scale changes. I was born just months before the unleashing of nuclear weapons and the mass murder of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and just before the revelations of Dachau and  Auschwitz, mass murder at an industrial scale. I’ve lived in the shadow of those monstrous events for my entire life, and they have become metaphors for the possible fate of the Earth. A century ago common sense said that Nature was too big—the ocean infinite, the atmosphere boundless—to react to any human influence. Anyone who believes that today is delusional—blinded by the ruling-class ideology of the “free market.” The collision with a giant asteroid did away with the dinosaurs, but human impact may prove to be a much greater threat to life on Earth. An insanely myopic and antisocial sense of “freedom” is incessantly invoked to fuel the Death Star. We must resist, rise up—we have a world to win.

ONLY two more days to vote…

…for Mother Country Radicals in the election (below).

PLEEEEZE help by posting and emailing friends and colleagues, far and wide. Tell everyone to vote.

Zayd is first in one category, and tied for first in the other.

THXXXX

Also of interest: the pdf below is a review from Vanity Fair.

POST:

Mother Country Radicals was nominated for the Signal Award in both Documentary and Best Writing. Winners are determined by public vote, so PLEASE VOTE in BOTH categories and share widely!

https://vote.signalaward.com/PublicVoting#/2022/limited-series-specials/general/documentary

https://vote.signalaward.com/PublicVoting#/2022/limited-series-specials/craft/best-writing

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/12/best-2022-podcasts-politics-radicalism-rachel-maddow-weather-underground