A few weeks ago while running at the gym, I was listening to a podcast of an interview on the Leonard Lopate Show with the now infamous William Ayers . While I am not qualified to comment on the veracity of Ayer’s accounts of the 1960s, I did find the following remarks by Ayers to be thought provoking:
We have never come to terms with the war in Vietnam, what we really did, what was lost there. in terms of purpose and so on. We haven’t learned what it means to invade and occupy a country. We haven’t accounted for responsibility. So while I get held up as somebody who was violent which I reject. I was not violent. Henry Kissinger gets a pass. There is something wrong with that. We ought to really have truth and reconciliation process if we want to understand what went on.
His words reminded me of another podcast I had listened to last year in November at the airport in Paris on my way back to Madrid. It was the Bill Moyers Journal podcast, and James H. Cone was talking about the history of lynching in America and how as a nation we refuse to recognize our collective guilt. For whatever reason, we take ourselves out of the historical context of our nation’s sins, and think of ourselves therefore as collectively innocent. How can I be responsible for slavery, the genocide of native Americans, or any serious of morally reprehensible actions committed by the nation before I was even born? As a matter of fact, even bringing up any of these matters can often times be considered anti-patriotic. Continue reading
