Obsessing

I am obsessing just a little on the Bill Ayers/ Weather Underground story. It is being discussed a lot since Bill Ayers has broken his silence after the election. It makes me want to read his memoir Fugitive Days and see the Weather Underground documentary.

One reason that it interests me so much, is that this is my childhood history. Madison, Wisconsin -- where I grew up and still live -- was one of the "hotbeds" of anti-war activism, along with Berkley, et al. I lived about a mile off of the university campus and during riots, vestiges of teargas clouds would waft through our neighborhood. My parents, who were a doctor and a nurse, would go down to help patch students up after a meleé.

One of the decisive events that turned the anti-war movement around actually occurred here in 1970: 4 young men who identified with the Weather Underground, detonated a car bomb outside of a university building that housed the controversial Army Math Research Center. Like the WU, they wanted to destroy only the property and thought that by doing it in the middle of the night there would be no people present. Unfortunately, there was a graduate student working in his lab, Robert Fassnacht, a man with a wife and young children, who died in the blast.

Of the 4 men, 3 of them were eventually apprehended and served time in prison. One of them, Leo Burt, has never been caught. He is still on the FBI's "most wanted" list. The oldest of the 4, Karl Armstrong, was identified as the "ringleader." At the time he was arrested, he professed to be largely unrepentant for his act and cited the context of the war on Viet Nam. As you might imagine, this did not sit well with many people, even those sympathetic to the cause. (I have friends who are friends with Fassnacht's widow, and I understand that she has not been able to forgive Armstrong and the others. Karl Armstrong has expressed remorse as time has passed.)

Daily Kos has a post up today discussing Ayers and the tactics of the WU. He also is adamant about looking at the context. While I consider myself to be a pacifist and absolutely do not condone any violence as a means to an end, I understand what he is saying. Karl Armstrong says that he became a revolutionary when his head hit the ground while being beaten by Chicago cops outside the Democratic National Convention in 1968. (My nephew said something similar when, at the age of 17, he was arrested at the WTO/IMF protests in Washington, DC. While he was in custody, a federal marshal told him that he would "mess him up so bad, his mom wouldn't recognize him." Nice.)

In the late sixties there were groups of people in the US who felt that war was being waged against them, and evidence shows that it was not far from the truth. And then consider that many of these people were in their late teens or early twenties ... it's the whole frontal lobe development thing!

I am nearly 50 and a practicing Quaker; as I said before, I do not condone what was done. But I certainly understand it in its context. (Believe it or not, I understand what Timothy McVeigh did, in its context. In fact, I have to condemn violence in all forms, because the actions of a Timothy McVeigh seem to be the logical conclusion of the "destroy property, not people" actions of a group like the Weather Underground.)

One of my all time favorite documentary films is The War At Home. It is about the anti-Viet Nam war movement as it unfolded in my hometown (though it easily could have been made in any number of places.) If any of this interests you, I'm sure that the film is available through Netflix.

Oy, too much thinking for a Sunday morning when I really need to be doing some laundry.

Peace, friends.

Worth Reading

Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! is devoting 2 days to an interview with Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. Part 1 aired yesterday. Here is the transcript. Part 2 airs on Monday.

Note: This is a far more honest interview than the one on Good Morning America yesterday. Yesterday's interviewer so badly wanted Ayers to say that he was intimate friends with Barack Obama, something that so clearly is not true.

I also want to say that Obama handled the allegations during the campaign gracefully, without throwing Ayers under the bus. I was happy to see that Ayers felt the same way.

Pallin' Around With Terrorists

In These Times has an excellent article by Bill Ayers. You can read it here.