ShareThisYou read about someone like Bill Ayers, a bomb-throwing, wild-eyed radical thug who even in his mid-60s still comes across as self-righteous, someone who thinks himself better than the rest of us, and you look for clarity. Here it is.
"Do you regret your involvement in setting off explosions in the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol," he is asked in a short, highly formatted, one-page interview in The New York Times Magazine, and he responds with an accusation.
"Anyone who thinks what we did is despicable should look at the fact that the U.S. government killed three million people in Indochina between 1965 and 1975. That's really despicable."
There it is. It's OK to destroy property and put lives at risk if some other entity is destroying lives and property. If 50,000 people a year are killed on American highways every year, we know what your duty is. Drive recklessly. And if you then take out a few more people here and there, why the despicable thing is the 50,000, not what you did.
Of course, he says his cheerful, little group, the Weathermen, didn't plan to kill anybody. But it did. Three members killed themselves in a bomb factory of a house through their apparent klutziness while assembling a device that just happened to be filled with nails. I'd say there was deadly, if not suicidal, intent in putting together such a weapon, and I'd say, too, that the bombing of buildings was dangerous.
Geez, they were empty, Ayers has told us. But anytime you go around setting off explosions there's a chance of fatal mistake.
I remember working in an office in the state capitol in Albany, N.Y., in the early 1970s, and at one point being asked to evacuate on the order of every few days while police responded to warnings by looking for bombs. I got to the point where I did not leave. I had stories to write, deadlines to meet. And while no bomb ever did go off in the capitol, one did go off in a nearby state office building one night. How could the juveniles who put it there know everyone had taken off, that there was no janitor around or maybe a watchman trying to do his duty?
The truth is, they didn't care because they were too involved in ego fantasies about saving the world. Ayers has talked about living a life that matched his values, but what he and these others were doing was living lives of self-worshipping, false heroism that set them above the hoi polloi.
I've never seen any statistics on it, but I've met a few of these far-out leftists and read about many others, and most seem to have come from privileged circumstances -- Ayers' father had been CEO of Commonwealth Edison. Such a background does not necessarily mean anything errant, obviously, but it does here, it seems to me.
Karl Marx -- a guiding light for Ayers -- thought social revolution would come from the proletariat when efforts to achieve it have in actuality mostly come from elitists -- in this case, from fanatical hooligans who evolved to that point from having first been spoiled brats.
As even Ayers has by now halfway conceded, the bombings didn't accomplish anything -- they almost surely hurt his cause of ending the 10-year-long Vietnam War. They also did not get in the way of his career.
He is a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago, is a player in Chicago civic life, is at the least an acquaintance of the current president of the United States and has lately been spouting his leftism with a seeming sense of gregarious glee.
For lesser crimes than his, some people have rotted in prison.
(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)
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