Rawrah's Ombudsman OR We pause now for a few important messages.

The Americans with Issues Project (or somesuch) spent a few million dollars reminding folks that Barrack Obama lives in the same Chicago neighborhood as Bill Ayers. They made what they consider to be a Public Service Announcement that put Bill Ayers, member of the Weather Underground together with Barrack Obama, who was EIGHT YEARS OLD at that time, to show how RADICAL and SCARY Obama be.

In REAL time they were 4800 miles and a couple decades apart in age, with very different concerns occupying their time and space. They didn't know each other or consider that twenty years later they would both live on the south side of Chicago and be involved in efforts to improve their neighborhood, their city and their country.
BUT somehow that's what happened. They knew each other then, in much the same way that John MeCain knew Sarah Palin 30 years ago. Palin may have seen MeCain on TV?
I wonder if 4 year old Sarah thought/said then "Hey, 30 years from now I'm going to be his running mate for the White House."?

Ayer's most famous print-bite, and the basis for the Obama attack ad from AWIP, is the infamous "We didn't do enough" which came in an interview conducted prior to 9/11/2001, but which appeared in the New York Times that fluttered through the Manhattan air on that morning as a pull-out quote of the larger piece.

On 9/15/2001 the times printed a letter from Ayers that concluded;

"Some readers apparently responded to her piece, published on the same day as the vicious terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, by associating my book with them. This is absurd. My memoir is from start to finish a condemnation of terrorism, of the indiscriminate murder of human beings, whether driven by fanaticism or official policy. It begins literally in the shadow of Hiroshima and comes of age in the killing fields of Southeast Asia. My book criticizes the American obsession with a clean and distanced violence, and the culture of thoughtlessness and carelessness that results from it. We are now witnessing crimes against humanity in our own land on an unthinkable scale, and I fear that we might soon see innocent people in other parts of the world as well as in the U.S. dying and suffering in response.

All that we witnessed September 11—the awful carnage and pain, the heroism of ordinary people—may drive us mad with grief and anger, or it may open us to hope in new ways. Perhaps precisely because we have suffered we can embrace the suffering of others and gather the necessary wisdom to resist the impulse to lash out randomly. The lessons of the anti-war movements of the 1960s and 70s may be more urgent now than ever."

With the anniversary approaching, again, and in keeping with "We didn't do enough",
Ayers is once more trying to bring context and clarity to his quote.

"The only answer to organized money is organized people." - Bill Moyers

And finally, a little something for the teachers. If you're lucky, your classroom is full of kids just like this one. If you don't see them, it doesn't mean they aren't there. They might just be shy. You have something that belongs to them. (or should)

If they aren't getting it, perhaps it's your delivery?