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When I Was Arrested Opposing The War In Vietnam In 1965, As I Said About 20 Or 30% Of People Were Opposed To The War. By 1968, More Than Half Of Americans Were Opposed To The War. If You Pull In Europeans, Canadians, People From Around The Third World, The War Was Vastly Unpopular. But Even Half Of Americans By 1968 Opposed The War.

-Bill Ayers

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When I Was Arrested

Bill Ayers

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When I Was Arrested Opposing The War In Vietnam In 1965, As I Said About 20 Or 30% Of People Were Opposed To The War. By 1968, More Than Half Of Americans Were Opposed To The War. If You Pull In Europeans, Canadians, People From Around The Third World, The War Was Vastly Unpopular. But Even Half Of Americans By 1968 Opposed The War.

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I Do Think [barack Obama's] Strategy For Re-election Is So Misguided. He's Counting On The Republicans To Self-destruct, And They Might, You Know, But They Might Not. So He Might Be A One-term President.

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Hating War In Vietnam In 1965 Was Minority Position.

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The First Thing I Did [in Michigan] Was Join A Picket Line Of A Pizzeria In Ann Harbor In 1963 That Didn't Allow African Americans To Eat There.

African American

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Whether Or Not The Working Class Came To Chicago In 1969 In The Days Of Rage Is Not A Measure Of Their Commitment To Stopping The War Or To Seeing Life In Certain Way. There Were Very Few Of Us Who Were There, And Those Of Us That Were Had An Illusion About Ourselves.

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I Think That You're Smarter Than We Were, But We Had Two Things: One Is, In Our Naïveté We Believed We Could Change The World. And Number Two, We Believed That Another World Was Possible. And Once That Belief Took Hold Of Some Critical Mass, A Tiny Minority Nonetheless, But A Critical Mass Of People, Then The World Did Change.

Being Arrested That Also Changed Everything For Me Because I Was Suddenly Seeing America From A Different Perspective All Together. I Did A Couple Of Weeks In A County Jail.

The [vietnam] War's Gone On For Three Years. And We'd Thought We'd Ended It Because We'd Done Exactly What We Were Told And What We Told Ourselves We'd Had To Do. We Had A Majority. We Were Against The War And This Created A Crisis For Democracy And A Crisis For The Antiwar Movement.

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If You Were Against Slavery In 1840 And A White Person, You Would Have Been Against The Law, The Bible, Your Church, Your Pastor, Your Parents, Common Sense, Tradition, Everything. You Would Have Been Against Everything.

Living In A Bubble As I Said In A Featherbed Of Privilege. That's Why Leaving Home, Leaving The Prep School And Going To The University Of Michigan In The Early '60s Was A Moment Of Awakening And To Go To A Place Like Michigan And To See Suddenly A World In Flames And The Injustices All Around Was Quite A Wake Up Call. I Lasted A Year And A Half At Michigan Before I Dropped Out And Joined The Merchant Marines And I Was A Merchant Marine For My Sophomore Year Then I Came Back To Michigan.

There Was One Moment When J. Edgar Hoover And Us Had The Same Distorted Lens About Who We Were - "a Real Threat," You Know? He Thought So And We Thought So And We Were Buddies In That Regard.

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Democratic Society

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Politicians Are Conservative By Nature.

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We Were Very Excited And We Brought Speakers In Then It So Happened That There Was A Marine Recruiter In The Center Of Campus And One Of Our Brothers, One Sds Person Put Up A Sign With A Quote From The Nuremberg Trial And An Arrow Point At The Marine Recruiter, Saying, "this Man Is A War Criminal." My Younger Brother And I, He Was Freshman And I Was A Sophomore, Got Caught Up In The Debates That Were Swirling Around The Center Of Campus And The Young Trotskyists Had Put Out A Fact Sheet On Vietnam That Was Phenomenal.

We Just Watched This Budget Debacle Right? Seventy-three Percent Of Americans Want To Tax The Rich. Why Can't The Politicians Respond To That? Because They Are The Rich. And They Are Beholden To The Rich. It's A Captured System.

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I Breathed The Air Of Deliverance Through Books, And Through Books I Leapt Over The Walls Of Confinement.

I Wanted A Racially Just Society. I Wanted To End Wars. I Wanted To End White Supremacy. I Wanted To Create A World That Was Based On Egalitarianism, Sharing, Racial Justice.

I Don't Think Saying "i Was Wrong Here, I Was Wrong There" Absolves You Of Anything Particularly, Nor Does It Get You Into Heaven.

Part Of The Fun Of Writing, Touring, Teaching, Is Engaging With Real People About All Of It: What To Do Now, How To Build A Movement, Of Approaches To Teaching, Of Parenting - It's Exciting To Be In That Dialogue.

In A Wild And Diverse Democracy Each Of Us Should Be Trying To Talk To Lots And Lots And Lots Of People Outside Of Our Own Kind Of Comfort Zone And Community, And That Injunction Goes Even Further For Political Leaders. They Should Talk To Everyone, They Should Listen To Everyone, And At The End Of The Day They Should Have A Mind Of Their Own.

The Truth Is That The Antiwar Movement Was Powered By The Working Class. The Students Were The Ones That Got The Media And So Forth, But It Was The Soldiers On The Ground Who Really Energized The Antiwar Movement In The Late Sixties.

The Idea That You Live Your Life In Phases - I've Never Bought That. I Feel Like I'm The Same Person Who Sat In At The Draft Board In 1965, I'm The Same Person Who Joined A Fraternity, I'm The Same Person Who Got An Mfa At Bennington, And I'm The Same Person Who Founded Weather Underground. My Values Are Still Intact.

I Would Say When I Went To Michigan. It Started. I Got Very Very Involved In Civil Rights In Ann Harbor Right Away. Picketing, Something I Never Even Knew Existed.

I Dropped Out In '64. And I Came Back To Michigan, In '65. In 1965, When I Came Back I Had Never Heard Of Vietnam.

The Us Is Indeed A Terrorist Nation. ...it's Also The Greatest Purveyor Of Violence On Earth Over The Past Half Century, And The Foremost Threat To World Peace Today.

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I Was Arrested In 1965 For Opposing The War In Vietnam. There Were 39 Of Us Arrested That Day. But Thousands Opposed Us. And The Majority Of The People In The Country Supported The War Then.

Art And Activism Can Be Symbiotic. They Don't Have To Be, Of Course; They Can Also Be Contradictory.

Education Is A Right, It's A Journey, It's A Process, And It's Something We Have To Stand For, As Hard As It Is.

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[martin Luther King] King Was A Socialist And King Was An Activist Who Was Really A Radical By The End.

In Terms Of My Own Behavior And Activity, The Funny Thing About Regrets And Saying "i'm Sorry," Is That There's So Much I Would Do Differently And Want To Do Differently Moving Forward.

I'm Not So Much Against The War As I Am For A Vietnamese Victory. I'm Not So Much For Peace As For A U.s. Defeat.

Every Revolution Seems Impossible At The Beginning, And After It Happens, It Was Inevitable.

Education Is The Motor-force Of Revolution.

Something About The Fact That An African American Had, Given The Long Sad History Of Our Country, Now Become President - That Was Exhilarating.

African American

All That Means To Me Is That People Who Have A Vision Of A Better World Have A Responsibility To Open Their Eyes, To Pay Attention, To Act On What The Moment Demands, And To Be Humble About That Action.

I More Or Less Shared The View That Life Should Be Lived.

It Transmitted Because On The Campuses, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Was Recruiting, Was Organizing. Students For A Democratic Society Was Founded At Michigan Just A Couple Years Before I Got There. So, There Was A Kind Of A Churning Of Political Awareness. It Was Just Beginning.

I Always Say Your Body Is The Temple Of Your Spirit, Why Not Decorate It? My Kids Say, No, No, Your Body Is The Temple Of Your Spirit, Keep It Clean. I'm Covered In Tattoos And I Get A Tattoo Every Time I Write A Book. I Get The Tattoo From The Book.

I Know That's A Little Jarring, Coming From A Weatherman, But What I Mean By Being Humble Is Doubting If Your Action Did Anything. So You Have To Open Your Eyes, Act And Doubt. And Then You Have To Repeat For A Lifetime.

It's Worth Remembering That In 1965, Something Like 20% Of Americans Were Against The War. Something Like 70% Were For The War. So, It Wasn't A Popular Or An Easy Thing To Do.

That's In The Nature Of Social Change. So You Can Analyze What Didn't Work, But It's Very Hard To Predict What Will Work.

That's What [abraham] Lincoln Said. "the White Man Will Always Be Above The Black Man. I Don't Want Them To Run For Office, Or Have Political Rights, Or Vote. I Want Them To Go Back To Africa."

You Need To Find A Way To Live Your Life, That It Doesn't Make A Mockery Of Your Values.

Where's The Activism? Nobody Knows. And Anyone Who Thinks They Know, Like Todd Gitlin, Has Their Head Up Their Ass. Nobody Knows. The Day Before Every Revolution That's Ever Happened, That Revolution Was Impossible. The Day Before Rosa Parks, That Was Impossible. The Day After, It Was Inevitable.

Chicago '68 Was A Relatively Small Demonstration For Its Time, But I've Talked To Millions Of People Who Claim They Were There Because It Felt Like We Were All There. Everyone From Our Generation Was There And Was At Woodstock.

Students For A Democratic Society Was Also Affiliated With The Civil Rights Movement Everywhere.

I Don't Know Why There's Not More Activism Today. I Do Think That Your Generation Is Twenty Times Smarter Than Our Generation Ever Was, But The Problem With Being Smart Like You Guys Is That It Can Lead You Really Easily To Being Cynical, And Cynicism Is Actually A Pacifying Attitude.

Without A Doubt. It's Woven Into Our Dna In A Very Deep Way And So To Kind Of Be Smacked In The Face With The Hypocrisy Of The America That We Were Sold Was A Liberating And Harsh Experience.

If You Listen To The Debate, [barack Obama] And [john] Mccain Said The Same Thing About Gay Rights.

The Only Path To The Final Defeat Of Imperialism And The Building Of Socialism Is Revolutionary War.

Writing A Memoir Has A Particularly Excited Sense Of Narcissism.

I Don't Buy The Whole Mythology Of The Sixties. I Think I'm An Intergenerational Person.

If The Logic Of Capitalism Is "expand Or Die," Then Either It Has To Die Or The World Has To Die.

The Idea That Teaching Is Somehow The Delivery Of The Goods Is Such A Misunderstanding Of What Actually Goes On.

Guilty As Hell. Free As A Bird. America Is A Great Country.

When I Was Arrested Opposing The War In Vietnam In 1965, As I Said About 20 Or 30% Of People Were Opposed To The War. By 1968, More Than Half Of Americans Were Opposed To The War. If You Pull In Europeans, Canadians, People From Around The Third World, The War Was Vastly Unpopular. But Even Half Of Americans By 1968 Opposed The War.

Everything Was Absolutely Ideal On The Day I Bombed The Pentagon.

One Of The Great Crimes Of The Bloomberg/klein Administration [in New York City] Is That They've Removed Themselves From Communities, As If Communities Have Nothing To Say About What Their Needs And Aspirations Are For Themselves And For Their Children.

[students For A Democratic Society] Was On Many Campuses And It Was A Powerful Organization. It Was Founded By Tom Hayden, Who Passed Away Very Recently. It Was One Of The Founders Of Sds And That Chief Writer Of The Port Huron Statement, Which Is Still Worth Reading. It's Kind Of The Bernie Sanders Campaign Document In A Funny Way.

Martin Luther King Was Only An Activist For 13 Years And Every Year He Changed And Every Year He Became More Radical. By The End He Was Calling For Revolution. People Don't Know This Because They Go To Too Many Prayer Breakfasts On His Birthday.

I Proposed A Law That Every Country Where The U.s. Has A Military Base - Those People Should Be Allowed To Vote In The American Election.

I Mean The Prime Case That You Can Look At Is Martin Luther King, Who Was Only An Activist For 13 Years. But Every Year, He Became Deeper, More Concerned, Connecting More Issues.

Organizing The Working Class In England Or The U.s. Or Any Other Advanced Capitalist Country Has Been A Daunting Challenge.

There's Something So Remarkable In The Intensity Of Taking Care Of Somebody Who Can't Take Care Of Him Or Herself. And Then Watching That Little Person Bloom Into Adolescence.

The World Spends Two Trillion Dollars A Year On Military, And Of That Two Trillion The United States Spends One Trillion. We Have A Bigger Military Than The Rest Of The World Put Together. We Have 150 Foreign Military Bases.

The Passions And Commitments That Ignited My Activity As A Student Are The Same Passions And Commitments That I Have Today.

I Suffer From A Genetic Flaw, Which Is That My Mother Was A Hopeless Pollyanna.

We're Actually Saying, Here's A Principle That I'd Like To Arc Toward. That's A Very Different Role In Life. I Didn't Expect [barack] Obama To Go To The Root Of Things. I Didn't Expect Him To Have A Principled Position On Anything. I Mean, Just Pay Some Moderate Attention To The Guy.

Your Body's Always Going Through Changes. It's Fattening Or Thinning Or Wrinkling Or Blotching, And The Only Thing You Really Have Control Over Is Putting Some Decoration On It.

Going Through Changes

[the Whole First Year At University] Was A Great Time For Me And Great Time Of Awakening.

We All Want To Believe This American Pastoral, But There's More To It. We Have To Be Willing To Exile Ourselves From The Fantasies And The Mythology That We Create Around Ourselves, Or We're Doomed To Kind Of Innocently Blunder Into Every Country In The World And Murder People.

[barack] Obama Doesn't Disappoint Me, Because All During The Campaign He Said, I'm A Pragmatic, Middle-of-the-road, Compromising Politician.

I've Said For Thirty Years That Capitalism Is An Exhausted System. But Now You Can See The Handwriting Everywhere. And One Especially Horrifying Part Is The Fiscal Crisis.

Beginning To Dismantle The Pentagon Would Save $1 Trillion A Year - A Small Government Proposal If Ever There Was One.

Who's The Big Government Guy? These Labels Are Nonsense. And The Tea Party, If You Want To Call Them Working Class, You Know, A Working-class Insurgency From Below, They Are A Mass Of Contradictions; They Don't Have A Single Consistent Viewpoint; But Part Of Their Impulse Is To Be Wary Of Government.

I Don't Know That I Ever Bought Into The "american Dream." I Was A Child Of Privilege. I Grew Up In The '50s And It Was A Quiet Time In America, At Least On The Surface And I Grew Up In A Kind Of Feathery Bed Of Privilege.

Everyone Who Knew [barack] Obama From Being In Hyde Park Knew He Was The Smartest Guy In Any Room He Walked Into; A Decent, Compassionate, Lovely Person; Pragmatic, Middle-of-the-road And Ambitious.

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