My mom wrote me an e-mail about William B. Ayers becoming news again.
I don't know if she intended me to start thinking about the relationship between the 60's political left and today's democratic party, but that's what happened.
Being infamous for pursuing "social justice" has been a sort of badge of honor in the political left since the 60's.
While Obama is probably right to denounce acts of "domestic terrorism" I wish my generation was as politically engaged as many of Ayers' contemporaries (my mom?). Some of it went too far, but the death of the political energy of the 60's is a sad moment for America. It was one thing for Americans to feel oppressed by segregation, and Jim Crow, and the draft, but quite another, in my opinion, to be deceived, and it is this deception which characterized Nixon, and George W. Bush. It is the system turned against the people, using the system's own rules, which is so corrupt.
John McCain, for all of his heroism and Maverick nature, is (dare I say this) bound up in the ruling cabal of the agents of this abuse, the Republican party. Sarah Palin is ample evidence of this desecration of American values of truth, fairness, objectivity, and reason, exchanging them for secrecy, corruption, and "gut".
I think a lot of Obama supporters are in a place where we can see the Weathermen, or the Black Panthers, as the youthful versions of political activists who went on to become engaged adults- well maybe some of them did. Fox Noise would probably call this a very "northeast media elite" view, I suspect, but that's how I felt when this all came up during the primaries. I want a president who has met some 60s radicals, and knows where he stands in relation to them.
The New Yorker's endorsement of Obama makes all these points better than I did.