weather underground

i have an insouciant instinct to want to shock you with this post by starting off with an outrageous statement such as, "THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND," or, "THE WEATHERMEN UNDERGROUND, WERE UTTERLY RIGHTEOUS!!" however, because i crave your trust, i cannot in good conscience make that statement.

if you know me though, you know that i prefer documentary movies as my best source for news. (the reasons are the making of another blog entry, another day.)

with all the hubbub around barack obama's association with bill ayers, who was a member of the weather underground, i thought i should watch this movie to see what i could discern, if anything, about ayers, as well as to get a history lesson on this radical group. the documentary did not disappoint. it is as fair and responsible as one could hope for and it is truly well made in every way. (kudos to director bill siegel.) in fact, the documentary was so well done, it caused me to google black panther fred hampton when i was through watching the movie, to learn more about him and the circumstances surrounding his death, and then also to add a book to my amazon.com wishlist which is soledad brother, by george jackson. (when a documentary moves me to further research, i am impressed.)

there is a substantial amount of background i can't possibly convey and for which, you should consider watching the movie yourself. that said, the name the weather underground is a reference to a bob dylan song, wherein dylan said you didn't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blew. the weathermen firmly believed there was a revolution in progress and they were just one group dealing with it as they saw fit.

largely, the weathermen were a response to the vietnam war. the kids who founded it in some respects hijacked and stole a less radical body of students who had been affiliated with sds, students for a democratic society.

i think there was a certain amount of cognitive dissonance going on with the members of weather underground. they were bright college students who lived in america at a time when we were involved in an especially unsavory, often illegal, and wholly destructive war in vietnam. the weathermen were profoundly affected by the war. they read the news reports. they understood the level of carnage going on in vietnam. from mai lai to the carpet bombing of cambodia, the weathermen may have even felt guilty for being americans and living here while the war raged on over there.

i guess they grew up like most americans hearing about how great this country was, pledging allegiance to the flag, believing that goodness and honesty would always be rewarded while those who cheated and connived their way to the top would be caught up with one day. when they arrived on their college campuses, i guess they began to see these notions unravel.

one of the weathermen, mark rudd, talks about how much the war weighed on him in the movie. today he is a math teacher at a community college in new mexico but in those days, he says he thought about the war every day. even on holidays or when he should have been having a good time, he thought of the war.

the people in the weather underground were right, ultimately, about the united states' government. they believed there was a great deal of corruption and there was and is. it is likely in excess of 1.1 million people who died in the vietnam war and that is not even counting american servicemen and women.

to talk about vietnam and the weather underground today without mentioning our occupation of iraq would be to miss the point of history. there are some obvious parallels and so it is easy to imagine and relate to and feel for the weathermen. a month ago or so i watched an hbo documentary called baghdad high, about a year in the life of three high school students in baghdad. it is a great movie because it humanizes these three iraqi kids in a way an american like myself could never get to know them or the nature of their lives.

in essence the weathermen acted as if they had documentary movies of the lives of the vietcong. they imagined their lives and translated the statistics and the news stories into real and palpable emotion.

with the benefit of time, (and a host of documentary movies such as: the fog of war and the trials of henry kissinger,) we can know that our action in vietnam was far from righteous. in turn, it is easy to understand the weathermen's dissatisfaction with the federal government. there was a lot of dissatisfaction at that time, from the black panthers and sds and martin luther king jr and women's groups and others.

where the weather underground went awry was likely in rejecting non-violence. there is a moment in the movie when bernadine dohrn tells a television news crew interviewing her that she absolutely rejects non-violence. her rationale seems to be that the vietnam war is not non-violent, killing fred hampton in cold blood in his sleep was not non-violent, and surely there are and were countless other examples of our government acting violently.

this view is representative of a certain impatience on the part of the people in the weather underground. they wanted change. they had a limited view of history, perhaps even refused to look at history in a macro-oriented way. on one hand they were like the small band of kids on the playground who decide not to be bullied anymore but in another sense they were a little bit like the thing they hated in as much as they thought they had cornered the market on right.
brian flanagan was a weatherman who comes across strongest in the movie in denouncing the actions of his former group. in retrospect he seems ashamed of his actions. and he is the one who suggests they were as wrong as anyone because they felt their sense of right as if it was an absolute. flanagan seems humbled by his error in judgment.

martin luther king jr had it completely right in realizing that non-violence was the only policy worth having. no self-respecting man respects an act of violence.

Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him. ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

mark rudd, one of the most prominent weathermen, admits to embracing his hate. like flanagan, he seems to recognize this as his error.

what the weathermen actually did was bomb symbolic places in order to make a point by way of protest. prior to settling on this method, they had initiated other forms of protest including the days of rage in chicago. their goal was to "bring the war home," yet many of their actions seemed to come up short of the hoped for effect.

they started with the port authority in san francisco and in this case, they placed a phone call at a quarter to midnight to warn of the planted bomb, asking the police and fire department to be sure the area was cleared as the bomb was set to go off in 15 minutes at midnight. certainly after one of their bombs accidentally blew up while under construction and killed three of their members, they made a conscious decision to be sure none of their bombs harmed anyone.

according to bill ayers, "We were very careful from the moment of the townhouse on to be sure we weren't going to hurt anybody, and we never did hurt anybody. Whenever we put a bomb in a public space, we had figured out all kinds of ways to put checks and balances on the thing and also to get people away from it, and we were remarkably successful."

what came through from the movie is the fact that the members of the weather underground were patriots. their methodology however, for promoting their agenda, was gravely wrong both morally and practically. bombs are violent by their very nature and masses were not going to get on board with the idea of acting violently.

it is noble to push for righteous change and for that i respect the weather underground. several of the members interviewed also said they remain radicals despite denouncing the violence. these people refused to simply preach a certain world view. they put it all into practice. in that way they may be better than those of us who do not act. however, when change does not occur fast enough to satisfy someone, that person should step back and recognize that it is noble to push in the direction of right. be frustrated but do not compromise your values and ethics on account of frustration.

in the big picture change happens slowly, but it does happen. we are not in the dark ages anymore. here in the united states we no longer allow women to be accused of being witches and hence, burned at the stake. we are progressing. even when we seem to go backwards, it is simply a necessary re-grouping that must occur to start the movement forward again. (this is how i view the bush administration.)

as for bill ayers, based on his actions since his days in the weather underground, he seems to be most respectable indeed. attacking obama for his association with ayers as a political strategy for a major party candidate is nothing more than a death knell for that campaign. still, i am glad ity all came up and i got to take myself to school again via netflix instant streaming and the resources of google, wikipedia and the internet.