Setting things straight

~Terri Gross interviewed Bill Ayers on Fresh Air today, and it was fascinating. I don't think I'd ever heard of Bill Ayers before Sarah Palin brought him up during the campaign. Yes, I'd heard of the Weather Underground, but I was a tween/young teen in the sixties, and just didn't pay that much attention to the details of the anti-war movement.

~Ayers is thoughtful and well-spoken, and he raised some really excellent questions about what "terrorism" means, and about EVERYONE needing to take responsibility for what the roles they played during the war. I was prepared to be a little hard on him, becasue I am a pacificst at heart, and he readily admits that he endorsed violence (although he maintains that it was always directed at property, not people)*. But I'm also the mother of an activist dughter and in his explanations for the decisions he made, I hear echoes of her thinking. Ayers didn't excuse what he did, and he didn't apologize--but he did put it in a context that made Palin's and the McCain campaign's characterizations of him, and the implied slurs on Obama for being associated with him seem all the more overblown.

~I won't rehash all of Ayers' arguments (listen to the interview--it's worth it). But the thing that impressed me the most, I think, was his calling for a truth and reconciliation commission (similar to what took place in South Africa after the end of apartheid) so that everyone involved in the war in any way might come to terms with their roles, that an honest look at what the war in Vietnam--and those in Iraq and Afghanistan--really mean, what they cost in terms of human life and erosion of the human spirit, so that real healing migth take place.

~I don't think that Obama and Ayers "palled around" in any real sense, but I have to say that after hearing this interview, if they had it would've been a good influence, not a bad one.

*and he maintains that he supporst non-violent resistance these days, which I fully endorse