This diary was not written by fernan47. A colleague asked me to post it here. Her screen name is Mavky.
As an historian who studies radical groups, I have found it remarkable that the Sixties have made such a come-back in our national political life. It is often said that if you remember the Sixties you werent really there, an aphorism that has taken on a new meaning as the McCain/Palin crowd hammers away at Bill Ayers with no visible understanding of the period at all.
The people of my generation and before, who were alive in the Sixties, faced the draft and watched television images of the anguish of a napalmed child screaming, wounded or dead students at Kent State; and Buddhist monks immolating themselves. These images appeared within the context of the brutal Civil Rights struggle that killed one of America's greatest heroes, Martin Luther King, Jr., who took a principled stand against the Vietnam War. When King was killed, after the most intensive surveillance by the FBI of any citizen in history, my parents sat down and openly wept. Later, we watched the gruesome story of Vietnam the one we couldn't see-- unfold in brilliantly directed films like Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Deer Hunter, and Born on the Fourth of July. When I think of these times, it still brings me enormous sadness at the senseless loss of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian people and our own soldiers. What, after all, was the point?
Now we see political ads with the black-and-white face of Bill Ayers in his long-hair days next to a photograph of the destruction to the Capitol from an old New York Times, an image that suggests a far greater level of destruction than there really was. In truth, the bomb was placed in a bathroom in a remote corridor at 1 am in the morning and did damage to seven rooms around it. The bombers had issued a warning and had meant a specific protest against the U. S. invasion of Laos in a war that had piled horror on top of horror in a violation of most people's sense of U. S. honor and decency. Was the Weather Underground right in attacking the U. S. Capitol? Nearly everyone in its parent organization, the Students for a Democratic Society, said no, and they still say no. Most former SDSers think that Weather destroyed a movement that was right to be critical of U. S. policy, a criticism that came from many sane, rational, and right-thinking people who objected to racism and a seemingly endless war. Weather, and a few other violent groups during this period, took the protest too far, even by their own admission.
But Weather was the product of a violent society that also nurtured a virulent and violent extreme Right that, for example, plotted to blow up a concert hall during a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. While the violent portion of the Left was active for about a six-year period and was motivated by specific U. S. policies, the extreme Right had waged a bombing campaign for many years against their African-American neighbors and, as we know to our great sadness, it has continued its war, culminating in Tim McVeigh's bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building. If you read the books that inspired Tim McVeigh,William Pierce's (aka Andrew McDonald's) Turner Diaries and Hunter--you will see the ugliness that is now surfacing in our political discourse. This portion of the extreme Right believes that black people, through affirmative action, are taking over the U. S. government and will take away their guns. It is as simple and as stupid as this, but enough to enrage a small portion of our citizens to extreme violence. The McCain/Palin campaign is toying with that rage in a campaign that has been utterly cynical and debased, and is putting our country at great risk.
To which fernan47 can only add, I second and third and forth that.