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William Ayers Interview
Thanks for running your brave interview "William Ayers on Obama, the 60s, Occupy and The American Spring." (OPEN EXCHANGE, April-June 2012.) While OPEN EXCHANGE increasingly offers the frankly political with the personal (for which gratitude galore), this intriguing interview is so politically progressive one might expect to find it in The Nation or The Progressive, maybe Mother Jones, so its appearance in your free publication is emphatically cheering. Exactly what will all our yoga, individual healing and personal spirituality do for us without a powerful collective resistance - like Occupy - to confront the horrific disintegration our nation is undergoing, and the brutal militarism we are inflicting.
With so many superb journalists (think Seymour Hersh, Chris Hedges, Robert Scheer) no longer able to get their work into... oh, say the New York Times, yours is an important act of conscience. Thank you for it.
Bob Baldock
KPFA Public Events Series
Bob, thank you for the generous acknowledgment, and, moreover, for your outstanding work producing KPFA's public events series, bringing the likes of Amy Goodman, Van Jones, Michio Kaku, and Rachel Maddow to the Bay Area.
Like you, we are also concerned that so many bold, progressive voices have been muted by the corporate media. When merely asking questions of a public figure such as William Ayers can be called "brave," we fear for the health of the body politic.
With roots in the 60s Free Speech movement as well as the 70s Human Potential movement, OPEN EXCHANGE has a dual, or more precisely, a "holistic" mission to promote "healthy living" in all its aspects, personal, political,and planetary.
Not everyone agrees, however. One reader (who preferred to remain anonymous) scolded us for publishing the Ayers interview, saying it was "out of bounds" for a "healthy living" magazine. He was particularly troubled by Ayers' history of violence in the radical Weather Underground. It troubled us, too, so we made a point to discuss it during the course of the interview. The first, best antidote to violence, we believe, is civil discourse.
We maintain that Ayers' explanation of his radical past, his recent association with Barack Obama, and most of all his articulate vision of social justice, made this interview particularly newsworthy.
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Epistle to the Ecotopians
By Ernest Callenbach
Ernest Callenbach, author of the classic environmental novel Ecotopia, founder of the internationally known journal Film Quarterly, and Berkeley neighbor, died at the age of 83 on April 16. Chick left a final message on his computer for us "Ecotopians" from which the following is excerpted. Special thanks to Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch.com for permission to reprint.
Read more here:
To all brothers and sisters who hold the dream in their hearts of a future world in which humans and all other beings live in harmony and mutual support — a world of sustainability, stability, and confidence, ...let us begin with last things first, for a change. The analysis will come later, for those who wish it.
Hope. Children exude hope, even under the most terrible conditions, and that must inspire us as our conditions get worse. Hopeful patients recover better. Hopeful test candidates score better. Hopeful builders construct better buildings. Hopeful parents produce secure and resilient children. In groups, an atmosphere of hope is essential to shared successful effort: "Yes, we can!" is not an empty slogan, but a mantra for people who intend to do something together.
Mutual support. The people who do best at basic survival tasks are cooperative, good at teamwork, often altruistic, mindful of the common good. In drastic emergencies like hurricanes or earthquakes, people surprise us by their sacrifices — of food, of shelter, even sometimes of life itself. Those who survive social or economic collapse, or wars, or pandemics, or starvation, will be those who manage scarce resources fairly; hoarders and dominators win only in the short run, and end up dead, exiled, or friendless....
Practical skills. When I was a boy in the country, all of us knew how to build a tree house, or construct a small hut, or raise chickens, or grow beans, or screw pipes together to deliver water. We all need to learn, or relearn, how we would keep the rudiments of life going if there were no paid specialists around, or means to pay them....
Organize. If the teetering structure of corporate domination, with its monetary control of Congress and our other institutions, should collapse of its own greed, and the government be unable to rescue it, we will have to reorganize a government that suits the people....
These are dark times, these are bright times. We are implacably making the planet less habitable. We are turning more land into deserts and parking lots. We are wiping out innumerable species that are not only wondrous and beautiful, but might be useful to us. We are multiplying to the point where our needs and our wastes outweigh the capacities of the biosphere to produce and absorb them. And yet, despite the bloody headlines and the rocketing military budgets, we are also, unbelievably, killing fewer of each other proportionately than in earlier centuries. We have mobilized enormous global intelligence and mutual curiosity, through the Internet and outside it. We have even evolved, spottily, a global understanding that democracy is better than tyranny, that love and tolerance are better than hate, that hope is better than rage and despair, that we are prone, especially in catastrophes, to be astonishingly helpful and cooperative....
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