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I mean, what’s he doing now? He’s evolving. Evolving? Well, evolve for Christ’s sake! And this is a guy – the whole gay community, and the whole environmental community and all these other people said, he’s our guy.

Bill Ayers

I voted for Obama and I was delighted that he’s been elected.
BILL AYERS

Country Delighted Elected President
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.
BILL AYERS

People Vietnam War
One of the things that happened that I think is noteworthy, my parents were pretty tolerant people given their position in society.
BILL AYERS

Agency Children Thinking
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.
BILL AYERS

America Children Dream
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 think Bowe Bergdahl, if he deserted, is a hero – I think throughout history we should build monuments to the unknown deserters.
BILL AYERS

Hero Should Thinking
Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.
BILL AYERS

Murdered People War
Agitators, organizers, activists, intellectuals aren’t bound by those rules. We’re not trying to figure out, how do I thread this particular needle?
BILL AYERS

Figures Thread Trying
This 1965. We went to trial on our city. We were obviously borrowing tactics and strategy from the Black freedom movement, and we were echoing their approach to things.
BILL AYERS

Black Cities Trials
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.
BILL AYERS

Lenses Moments Real
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.
BILL AYERS

Drop Lasted Marine Merchant Year
Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don’t have to be, of course; they can also be contradictory.
BILL AYERS

Activism Art Contradictory
But the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip.
BILL AYERS

Boys Fool Mind
I’d been arrested many times by then. I’d been an organizer, so many things had changed over those three years [from 1965 till 1968].
BILL AYERS

Changed Three Years
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
His [Martin Luther King] last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, is a direct reference to angles, barbarism or socialism.
BILL AYERS

Book Community Kings

I mean, what’s he doing now? He’s evolving. Evolving? Well, evolve for Christ’s sake! And this is a guy – the whole gay community, and the whole environmental community and all these other people said, he’s our guy.

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Popular Authors

I mean, what’s he doing now? He’s evolving. Evolving? Well, evolve for Christ’s sake! And this is a guy – the whole gay community, and the whole environmental community and all these other people said, he’s our guy.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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