This was sent to me in an email by a friend in Oregon and thought I would pass it on to my readers.

The attack on Bill Ayers needs to be placed in its political and historical context.

Born in 1944 in a Chicago suburb, the son of a prominent businessman and philanthropist, Ayers was radicalized by the civil rights struggles and the Vietnam War.

In his memoir, Fugitive Days, he writes of his thinking in the late 1960s: “Humanity itself, it seemed to me, was what was at stake. The humanity of people in Vietnam and around the world, the humanity of Black Americans, and, finally, my own humanity. You could not be a moral person with the means to act, I thought, and stand still. The crisis demanded a choice. To stand still was to choose indifference. Indifference was the opposite of moral. If we didn’t speak out and act up, we were traitors. To fail now was fatal, and so there was nothing that could justify inaction. Nothing.”

However mistaken his eventual political choices, Ayers’s was part of a generational experience. His sense of horror over US crimes in Vietnam, the destruction of a small nation, and his shame that this savagery was being committed in the name of the American people were sentiments shared by thousands and thousands of college and high school students, and young people in general.

As a leading member of the Weatherman group, Ayers admits to having set off several small bombs, which blew up a police memorial and damaged public buildings. No one was killed or injured in those actions. Ayers was never charged with, let alone convicted, of a crime.