Bill Ayers is a Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He’s a poster boy for the hate dredged by John McCain and Sarah Palin.
Waiting for the election to finish, he speaks:
In a robust and sophisticated democracy, political leaders—and all of us—ought to seek ways to talk with many people who hold dissenting, or even radical, ideas. Lacking that simple and yet essential capacity to question authority, we might still be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings today.
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At the turn of the last century, Eugene Debs, the great Socialist Party leader from Terre Haute, Ind., told a group of workers in Chicago, “If I could lead you into the Promised Land, I would not do it, because someone else would come along and lead you out.”In this time of new beginnings and rising expectations, it is even more urgent that we figure out how to become the people we have been waiting to be.