Pallin’ Around with Domestic Terrorists…

I hope it’s not telling that my first post ended up being one about Bill Ayers.  I’ve been waiting to write some deep treatise on what I believe, what my values are, and how that shapes my politics.  But that hasn’t happened (yet).  Instead, I was so struck by two things said in the first interview with Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn after the election that I had to share them.

I think it is a very provocative juxtaposition to have this couple, much maligned by the GOP, speak for a message of bottom-up change and fearlessness.

First, Bernadine discusses the biggest change to come from the result of the election:

And it does represent two important things, at least. One of them, it seems to me, is a pretty decisive rejection of the politics of fear, whether it’s fear that there’s some secret cell of domestic terrorists from the ’60s hanging around or fear that our major primary approach to the world and to raising our children should be one of fear. Obviously, life is—includes tragedy and pain and suffering, and that will come along, but approaching the world as five percent of the world’s people now seems possible, adjusting how the United States thinks of itself in the world. That’s, to me, an enormous thing.

The other striking part of the interview, for me, comes just a moment before when Bill Ayers says:

The question is, as Bernadine is saying, how do we build the movement on the ground that demands peace, that demands justice? This is always the question. It’s happening—the question is being raised in a new context. So how do—you know, I often think, thinking historically, Lyndon Johnson wasn’t the civil rights movement, but he was an effective politician who passed civil rights legislation. FDR wasn’t a labor leader. Lincoln didn’t belong to an abolitionist party. They all responded to something going on on the ground. And in a lot of ways, we have to get beyond—progressive people have to get beyond the idea that we’re waiting for a savior. We’re not waiting for a savior. We need to transform ourselves, transform our movements, reach out to one another and build an irresistible social force for change.

We are the change we have been waiting for.  The campaign slogan was not, “Yes I can,” but rather, “Yes, WE can!”

Read, Watch, or Listen to the interview at Democracy Now!