Nearly 40 years before a young bright eyed girl from New Jersey stepped on the "BLOCK M" in the Diag after she took her last final exam her first semester at The University of Michigan, a privileged young man from affluent Chicago took the same journey, under similar circumstances, yet in a totally different era.
In the Fall of 1992, I had just turned 18 years old. I was as apathetic as most children of baby boomers, searching for an identity while listening to Pearl Jam's "Black" on auto play on my brand new Maize and Blue Sony Discman (yeah, I had it all)! Luckily, for the "who gives a shit" and "me me me" attitude that was so characteristic of my X generation, my parents were fortunate enough to pour money and go into debt in order for me to have the privilege of an elite education. It was that year, and within my own Michigan experience, I became politicized.
Bill Clinton came to A2 that Fall. I was following some friends to the gallery near the Bell Tower in front of Horace Rackham, and was given a sign and pushed to the back of the growing mob. Understanding that I was merely a Freshman, yet knowing that "I was different," I waited, smoked a few cigarettes and stood accepting whatever was yet to come. I had lost my friends, which seems somewhat like a misnomer for I cannot remember who these friends were and I am sure I have lost touch in the 16 years since. I looked at my sign, was past a button and the roar began.
That day I "Rocked the Vote" and registered to become a habitual voter and (even still) continual supporter of former President William Jefferson Clinton. I have voted in every election since.
In 1964, William "Bill" Ayers, now infamous for the "domestic terrorist" rhetoric of the McCain/Palin folks, walked into the same elite institution that I would attend nearly 600 hundred miles and 28 years later. He came from the Midwest, so he probably had a head start on me with the whole Midwest "culture shock" thing, for I was a lot more New Jersey in 1992 than I purport to be in 2008. Nevertheless, young Ayers was politicized by his university environment in beautiful Southeast Michigan as well.
In the early 1960s, Ann Arbor, in conjunction with students and faculty, became a hotbed for antiwar and pro-civil rights activity. As many know, my undergraduate school founded many radical student organizations, most famously SDS--Students for Democratic Society. These (mostly white elite) students, and the movement that would sweep over elite and not-elite campuses throughout the decade, had awoken from a slumber produced by a myth of social homogeneity and Cold War induced conformity. Students, in A2 and elsewhere, were awaken by the sounds of faculty members from the New Left (some not much older than their students), teachers who thought outside the box of the conformist climate and risked the Scarlet "C" of Communist to interject oppositional thought into the young naive mind of "Greatest Generation" postwar youth. The Boomers.
A little known fact in circles outside of my academic ones, for I hang in many, is that Michigan was the first school to lead a protest against the escalation in Vietnam. Well before violent protests would rage on and off campus throughout the United States, yet shortly after Lyndon Baines Johnson raised the troops in Vietnam to over 300,000, daring university faculty, along with their virulent Wolverine student cohorts hosted the first teach-in which, in 1965, would spark a movement that continued for years from Columbia in New York to the University of Washington in Seattle. Since the Board of Regents and the University of Michigan administration would not let faculty teach about the implications of troop escalation or "surge" during classroom hours (oh boy what a different pedagogical climate it was), the teachers and students held special classes that began early in the evening and continued throughout the evening into the morning March 24-25 1965. It inspired the many students and future activists who stayed awake to learn about the Southeast Asian region that many had not known existed before the large escalation earlier that year.
This was the environment of a young sophomore Bill Ayers. As his education continued, protests became more prevalent, the war escalated into a quagmire and a very poorly executed foreign policy undercut many gains that were made on the social landscape during the era, specifically the dismantling of Jim Crow by the Civil Righters and the same dammed government that knotted the tangled web known as the Vietnam War. By 1968, MLK, the man of peace, and RFK, the candidate of peace, were brutally murdered in the media spotlight. The incumbent LBJ, who could have ran again, had to reject his party's nomination in disgrace thus inaugurating the era of the Silent Majority, the enigma of Richard Nixon, and the reprieve of the Cold War/ say nothing social and political climate of the mainstream.
By that time, some of the educated youth, including 21 year old Ayers and his soon to be wife Bernadine Dohrn decided they could not support a system that continued an abominable war which by that time had led to widespread genocide in the region, specifically in Cambodia when the US under Nixon decided to bomb that nation which ignited the terroristic Pol Pot regime, AND a system that would send in National Guardsmen to shoot at protesting students on the campus of Kent State University, prompting Neil Young to sing "...four dead in O-H-I-O."
Ayers, Dohrn and others decided to go underground. They were to make a statement by disrupting the system from within and attempt to unleash a campaign of attacks as a testament of protest that was fostered by years of angst and voicelessness, empowered by beliefs in their country and the rejection of the wayward path it was following. With deplorable tactics, more unsuccessful than successful, they attempted to uproot a system that in their eyes (and many others who were not as extreme) was undermining persons of color throughout the world in the name of stopping the spread of communism in Third World countries. Meanwhile, many others felt they were living in an America that was very much like a Third World country: dictated to and poor.
Dohrn and Ayers' Weather Underground founded in the late 1960s would dissolve by 1977. Members, disillusioned, fell into doldrum disco sounds of Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive."
Whether or not the Weathermen and women were successful is up to debate (my advisor wrote a fantastic book on the subject) yet what is known is that many of its members have become valuable members of their societies and turned their passion for equality inward and help organize communities and/or use their education to teach and assist others, mostly those who are not as privilege as them (or myself) to go to an elite institution like The University of Michigan. Bill Ayers would end up doing both.
In the late 1990s, Ayers held an event for a young community organizing lawyer who was making inroads in the urban poor community in troubled Chicago. It was a coffee function to gain donations for the young 30-something Barack Obama and his run for the Illinois Senate. At that time, young Obama did not know about Ayers' history as the co-founder of the Weather Underground nor what the implications of meeting Ayers would bring him many years later in his run for the most powerful government position in the world. Reasons could range from Obama was 2 when Ayers traveled to Ann Arbor (by the time Ayers and Obama met, even I had graduated Michigan) from the fact that when Obama got involved in Chicago community organizing and politics, the Weather Underground as a movement was filed in the boxes of the past, it's relevance was as it's name implied.
In short, Obama-Ayers "palling" around is pale-in comparison to some actual palling around with nefarious figures that range from Charles Keating and racist John K. Singlaub to the secessionist organization the "first Dude" belonged to until 2002 and the witch hunting/exorcising preacher who blessed the Governor this summer. In essence, the real pals of John McCain and Sarah Palin have not been too compliant and friendly to the American government and system, similar to if not worse than, William Ayers from 1968-1977; 40 to 30 years ago.
For the sake of further contextualization, Bill Ayers entered Michigan 10 years before I was born. I graduated Michigan twenty years after the Weathermen ceased to exist. Barack Obama was eight years old when the organizations faded into the past...
The point, the historical distance is too great for this weak blow to stick, but to point out the Obama-Ayers meager connection as blatantly as Sarah Palin has done the past few days shows how low the Republicans are willing to go; especially on a day when the stock market crashed (again) to it's lowest number in over 4 years.
But this is about history. And going back to the era I became politicized in the early 1990s, that fall day shortly after my 18th birthday, I recognize that I did not have a similar sense of immediacy and frustration in my country's worldview and viewed world that Ayers and his colleagues had thirty years prior. My alma-mater has not changed. It still politicizes it's youth. The times were just different. Yet, I share this story to suggest that even I am tangentially tied to Bill Ayers, by Wolverine and activist blood, and if you call that "palling around" so be it.
But it does make me wonder what shaking some one's hand would imply.
Nonetheless, this is an attempt to point to how easy we all can be connected by history; however, six degrees of Kevin Bacon or Dick Cheney really doesn't matter in the end. It is the individuals actions of the past that can come back to haunt us personally, for we cannot carry the past of each person we meet when we barely can handle our own personal past. What's fair game for McCain, should be fair game for us all, and with this economy, the Keating 5 connection sticks much better to a former radical who lives nearby...
1 comment:
Well put, Madera! Thanks for breaking it down.
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