Educate Activate Empower

Bill Ayers comments on the just completed campaign and the use of his name to create a false image with which to hammer Barack Obama. As the professor which he is, he goes on to draw some lessons from the experience.

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.

Maybe we could welcome our current situation--torn by another illegal war, as it was in the '60s--as an opportunity to search for the new.

Perhaps we might think of ourselves not as passive consumers of politics but as fully mobilized political actors. Perhaps we might think of our various efforts now, as we did then, as more than a single campaign, but rather as our movement-in-the-making. [...]

Yet hope--my hope, our hope--resides in a simple self-evident truth: the future is unknown, and it is also entirely unknowable.

History is always in the making. It's up to us. It is up to me and to you. Nothing is predetermined. That makes our moment on this earth both hopeful and all the more urgent--we must find ways to become real actors, to become authentic subjects in our own history. [...]

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.

The Obama campaign taught many people that it's possible to take their country's future into their own hands. It goes back to the premise behind the founding of the Democracy Cell Project which grew out of the Kerry-Edwards blogging community:

We can do amazing things when we choose to do so.

Yes We Can.