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People camped out at his house, and wondering who’s coming to visit, who’s going to be the Secretary of State – that all struck me as inane and stupid.

Bill Ayers

Organizing the working class in England or the U.S. or any other advanced capitalist country has been a daunting challenge.
BILL AYERS

Challenges Class Country
I wasn’t part of John Kennedy’s vision of the world, or Lyndon Johnson’s. I thought of them as anti-Communist imperial monsters.
BILL AYERS

Monsters Vision World
When you go into a college of education you’ve got aspirations of making a difference in people’s lives, of loving children, of working with kids, but none of that is affirmed in your college of education.
BILL AYERS

Children Country School
Even there, [Barack] Obama’s generals, his Pentagon, they’re telling him what to do. And the force for gay rights is inevitable. And you can say Obama will help us, and maybe he will, but only if we have something on the ground that will make him help us.
BILL AYERS

Country Gay Movement President Rights
The idea that teaching is somehow the delivery of the goods is such a misunderstanding of what actually goes on.
BILL AYERS

Goes Ideas Teaching
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.
BILL AYERS

Easy Remember War
Politicians are conservative by nature.
BILL AYERS

Conservative Nature Politician
You will be raising these kids in your mind your whole life. And they will change you. Your little contribution to it – twenty years from now, they’ll be marching off into other things and that’s still the legacy you leave.
BILL AYERS

Change Kids Mind Rising Years
“We all hated the war in Vietnam.” Well, it was easy to hate the war in Vietnam 40 years on.
BILL AYERS

Country Easy Hated People War
Where’s the activism? Nobody knows. And anyone who thinks they know, like Todd Gitlin, has their head up their ass. Nobody knows.
BILL AYERS

Parks Revolution Thinking
So that’s kind of amazing. But he was offered a cabinet post by Eisenhower in his second term. So he was moderate Republican. But if you asked him, he would’ve said, “I don’t have any politics. I’m a business person.” Mainstream, the American view, as he understood it.
BILL AYERS

Country Eisenhower Moderate Republican
I more or less shared the view that life should be lived.
BILL AYERS

Less Shared Should Views
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.
BILL AYERS

Kings Prayer Revolution Years
It wasn’t [Barack] Obama per se; it was the feeling on the ground; it was seeing an old black woman in a wheelchair being wheeled by her son waving a big American flag, and then seeing a guy with his baby in his arms saying,
BILL AYERS

Baby Mean Son Wheelchair Wheeled
I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.
BILL AYERS

Children Fire Military Trillion World
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

Country Opposed Third War World

People camped out at his house, and wondering who’s coming to visit, who’s going to be the Secretary of State – that all struck me as inane and stupid.

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People camped out at his house, and wondering who’s coming to visit, who’s going to be the Secretary of State – that all struck me as inane and stupid.

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Popular Authors

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