And the Mute Shall Speak
Yesterday, we noted that the once loud and loquacious among Barack Obama’s clerical entourage had lost their voices—only to magically rediscover them after the election!
Today, that cure has spread to Bill Ayers. Yes, Barack truly is the Messiah:
Whew! What was all that mess? I’m still in a daze, sorting it all out, decompressing.
For the past few years, I have gone about my business, hanging out with my kids and, now, my grandchildren, taking care of our elders (they moved in as the kids moved out), going to work, teaching and writing. And every day, I participate in the never-ending effort to build a powerful and irresistible movement for peace and social justice.
Where do you find the time, Bill? And you didn’t even mention the bane of my existence: laundry. Or does Bernardine take care of that?
During the primaries, the blogosphere was full of chatter about my relationship with Barack Obama. We had served together on the board of the Woods Foundation and knew one another as neighbours in Chicago’s Hyde Park. In 1996, at a coffee gathering that my wife, Bernardine Dohrn (also a founder of the Weatherman) and I held for him, I made a $200 donation to his campaign for the Illinois state senate.
That, right there, in six lines, is more coverage than the media provided in six months.
But Bill suffered so for his association with His Oneness—as too often happens to disciples of a messiah. Threats of torture and death—and that’s just from Dick Cheney!—and more hatred than any one man not named George W. Bush should ever have to endure.
But that which does not kill him makes him stronger:
In a robust and sophisticated democracy, political leaders – and all of us – ought to seek ways to talk with many people who hold dissenting, or even radical, ideas. Lacking that simple and yet essential capacity to question authority, we might still be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings today.
Maybe we could welcome our current situation – torn by another illegal war, as it was in the ’60s – as an opportunity to search for the new.
Perhaps we might think of ourselves not as passive consumers of politics, but as fully mobilized political actors.
Perhaps we might think of our various efforts now, as we did then, as more than a single campaign, but rather as our movement-in-the-making.
We might find hope in the growth of opposition to war and occupation worldwide.
Or we might be inspired by the growing movements for reparations and prison abolition, or the rising immigrant rights movement and the stirrings of working people everywhere, or by gay and lesbian and transgender people courageously pressing for full recognition.
Transgendered immigrant prisoners of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your gold-plated chains!
What do we want? Wiccan rights! When do we want ‘em? 1692!
Yet hope – my hope, our hope – resides in a simple self-evident truth: the future is unknown, and it is also entirely unknowable.
…
In this time of new beginnings and rising expectations, it is even more urgent that we figure out how to become the people we have been waiting to be.
Now whom does that sound like? I know I’m pretty cynical, but it sounds to me like the Weatherman-in-Chief is out to prove those rumors true that he’s the ghost writer of Obama’s life story. And why shouldn’t he? Royalty checks are thin and shallow compared to universal adulation.