Posted on 10/15/2008 7:30:59 AM PDT by KayEyeDoubleDee
Edited on 10/15/2008 7:49:56 AM PDT by Sidebar Moderator. [history]
I read occasionally of former Weatherman Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, both now not only accepted, despite their bombing campaign against America in the 1960s and 70s, but successful , establishment educators whose opinions on social issues are taken seriously. Every time I see Ayers’ name I shudder with fear and rage and realize that I will never be able to erase the mark he left on my life one evening 40 years ago.
It was at the Undergraduate Library at the University of Michigan on a Friday night in November 1965. I was a sophomore and was living in a sorority house -- Alpha Epsilon Phi. I was walking down the stairs to leave the library. Billy Ayers was standing on the first floor and started talking to me.
I thought he was cute. There seemed to be jovial kind of instant connection between us. As I am writing this now I think he must have noticed me before , boys were attracted to me in those days , and planned to try to pick me up. As we struck up a conversation, Ayers told me very quickly about his leftist activism as if he knew this would intrigue me. In fact, I had made attempts to join SDS and the anti Vietnam War Movement on campus during my freshman year but had been put off by what hustlers the young male “activists” were. They talked in lofty ideological abstractions, but they also used their political sophistication as a lure for young women who wanted to be on the right side of the great social issues of the day. I picked up on that cynicism early and so spent much of my freshman year at Michigan trying to figure out how to act. I was politically idealistic back then and believed in Tikkun Olam -- that we had to do something to make the world better.
My freshman year at Michigan I attended the Teach-Ins and the campus demonstrations against the Vietnam War and studied hard for my Chemistry exams once a month. At the same time, I decided to pledge a sorority, partially just to prove I could and partially because young women’s options for campus living arrangements were still quite limited in those years.
Despite the caution I’d learned about young ideologues on the make, I was charmed by Bill Ayers and by his savvy talk of politics and the children’s school he was involved with. He asked me to go to a party with him and I did. I have a vague memory of the house where the party was and the people there. I think he got quite drunk and I suppose I drank too. I remember walking home with him. He was very open about himself and told me he was one of 5 children and that he was from Chicago and that his father was rich.
I felt comfortable with Bill. Throughout my life I had always had a friendly buddy-kind of connection with certain boys and felt that I was developing such a connection with him.
I remember going back to his attic apartment -- he describes it in his book Fugitive Days. He had a roommate -- a black man who was 23 and married with children. There was a couch, a table, a stereo and a sink in the room. There were two beds – Ayers’ and his roommate’s on each side of the attic wall. I slept with him there.
I came there a few times afterward to talk and to listen to his LPs. I especially loved Glen Yarbough’s album Come Share My Life. I met Bill’s roommate who also worked at the children’s school. I also met Bill’s younger brother Rick. Bill was a year older than I and his brother was a year younger. He spent a lot of time at Bill’s apartment.
Bill Ayers’ apartment was around the corner and a half a block away from the sorority house. The more time I spent there, the more out of place I felt with my sisters. Sometimes I would stop by just to keep from having to go back to a place I had begun to think of as boring. I guess it was one of those evenings -- maybe on the way back from the library, maybe just to get out of the sorority house, I don’t remember exactly. What I do recall is that when I was getting ready to leave Ayers told me I couldn’t go until I slept with his roommate and his brother. At this point Bill and I had slept together just once. I was sexually inexperienced, having had only one serious boyfriend with whom I had recently broken up.
At first I thought Ayers was joking. I got up; and went to the door. He moved quickly to block me at the doorway. He locked the door and put the chain on it. I went to the couch and sat down and told him that I had no intention of having sex with his roommate and his brother or him. He said that I had no choice but to do as he said if I wanted to get out of there. He claimed that I wouldn’t sleep with his married roommate because he was black -- that I was a bigot. I had gone to school with black kids and had them as friends all my life. I couldn’t believe he was saying that to me
I felt trapped. I had to get out of the situation I was in and because he was so effective a guilt-tripper, I also felt I had to prove to him that I wasn’t a bigot. I got up from the couch and walked over to the black roommate’s bed and put myself on it and he f***** me. I went totally out of my body. I floated beside myself on the outside and above the bed looking at this black stranger f*** me angrily while I hated myself.
After that I had to go lie down on Bill Ayer’s bed for his brother to ***** me. Rick Ayers was a decent person, unlike his brother, and couldn’t go through with it He started and stopped and let me go. I also thought I had to let Bill ***** me but at that point he unbolted the door and I left.
I remember going back to the sorority house and talking to my best girlfriend and telling her what had happened. But there were no words yet to describe it. There was no term “date rape” yet in our political vocabulary. The notion of a psychological rape was not on the table.
I was a mess and felt it was my fault for letting it happen. I was ashamed. Back home at the end of the semester, I got my parents to send me to a psychiatrist. What had happened affected my ability to trust in a relationship with a man and I didn’t have a close relationship again for a long time.
I graduated in 1968 and went to Europe for the summer and came back right before the Democratic Convention. I worked for McCarthy in the Indiana primary. Wherever I went over the next few years, I carried with me the shame and guilt with me. I felt it had been my fault for not putting up more of a struggle against Ayers.
I started a PhD program in clinical psych at Yeshiva University in 1969. I was also working part time for a branch of the University of Chicago Institute for Social Research which was in the same building. I was there in a room with other employees one day sitting around a big table and coding questionnaires for a research study on Head Start when we heard a huge explosion. Soon after we discovered that it was a bomb that went off in the brown stone on 10th street which killed three buddies of Bill Ayers, who was now one of the leaders of the WeatherUnderground, a terrorist cult. One of the victims was Diana Oughton, his girlfriend at the time. I had known her: a kind soul who had worked at the Fresh Air Camp for troubled kids before she got mixed up with ever so persuasive Bill and the other Weatherman terrorists. When I found out she had been blown up, I thought how like him to send his girlfriend to make the bomb rather than do it himself.
I eventually moved to Israel, married and had a family. But for a long time I felt as if I existed in a time warp in relation to events in the US that were a continuation of the 1960s. In 1994 I returned to the States for my 30-year Mumford High School reunion. I was in NYC visiting a friend and asked about the Weathermen. He told me that Billy and Bernardine Dohrn had come up from the underground and resumed middle class life - including the radical politics - without being prosecuted for their crimes.
Later I read about Ayers and his book Fugitive Days on the Internet. This was just after the terrorist attack on 9/11 and he was entirely unrepentant for having been a terrorist himself. “I would do it again,” he told the Times when he was asked about having set a bomb in the Pentagon. I also discovered that he was a Distinguished Professor of Education at University of Illinois Chicago campus. I think that freaked me out more than anything. That a man so cruel and conscienceless could attain such a position enraged me. I contacted him by email through the University’s website. He wrote back that he didn’t remember me.
I was in Detroit in November 2001 and bought his memoir at Book Beat at Lincoln Plaza in Oak Park. I looked to see if there was some hint in it of what had become the defining event of my life. Nothing. But why should he remember me if he has convinced the world to forget, or is it forgive -- that he set out to launch a bombing campaign to blow up America?
Obama is an empty suit and really nothing more than the sum of his context. Thus, the context is very important.
Furthermore, I see it in many of the people who want to elect the marxist bama. They don’t know anything, and they don’t care that they don’t know. They just want to shake things up and stick it to the man. The think its interesting. He’s new, fresh. It really is the American Idol mentality.
I respect that. I think what hung you up is the issue of personal responsibility and on that you are exactly right and I do agree. It’s like the age old question of whether the woman who dresses provocatively is inviting sexual assault. I believe that courts have come down on her side over and over. But she is still an idiot for dressing that way.
But in situations like tho one described in the article, one’s ability to rightly conceive of personal responsibility or to act on that is compromised. And as ecomcon put it, “ You don’t get to rape someone just because she’s a basket case.”
“Those who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boots of those who kick them”.
Eric Hoffer
Wanna know why Pubbies are losing. Look in a mirror, looser.
We allow our country to be taken over by leftists. It started with the universities.
Translation: leftist males see their activism first and foremost as a way to pick up young girls who are pretty and naive.
Their desire is understandable, given that the older, less naive women on the left tend to be angry, thin-lipped harridans.
That is rape. Sex despite expressed lack of consent, and under the duress of a threat of force or violence. You are an ugly goon to try to argue otherwise. Again, if you want to know why conservatives are dispised look in a mirror. You are trying to split an unsplitable legal hair on something that decent people know is just plain wrong.
Kidnapping, yes... but the threat of being labelled “bigot” is not duress enough to force a reasonable person to comply. She wasn’t forced. She was guilted into it. The same thing happens constantly in every middle school in America. My black friends said it was the easiest way to get laid when they were in their teens. I wouldn’t be surprised if half of all white girls who have had only one sexual experience with a black male did it within hours of being asked, “What, are you racist?”
By her own admission, when "asked" to, she walked over to the bed of her own volition, and laid down (no mention of who removed her clothes, though). That is consent enough to avoid a rape charge. All she had to do was sit down, continue to say no, and wait for the door to be opened, or for them to mover her physically to the bed... THEN it's rape. She basically wanted to get it over with, and complied. Not the most romantic scenario... but not legally rape, either.
(Heck, if the female "jeez louise, let's get it over with" impulse is tantamount to rape, then most marriages feature rape on a regular basis.)
“Pschopath” is exactly right. It galls me whenever I hear a sound bite from him, as though being soft-spoken means he can’t be a horror of a person. Everything this POS does is meant to fool the fools.
I beg to differ with you. It’s part of Ayer’s character.
And we do give a crap.
Once the woman has said no, the exit way was blocked, the door was locked and the threat of force of violence was issued, it is rape.
Ayers = psychopath - I was thinking that yesterday!
This is the guy who, when acquitted, said “guilty as sin, free as a bird, what a country.”
But... but.... consensual sex between a husband and wife is rape, as a professor from the University of Michigan said a while back, so coerced sex between a man and an eighteen year old girl has GOT TO BE rape.
The Weather Underground was blowing up buildings around the same time at Hoffman, Senator Hayden and their lemmings were planning the take down of the Chicago Convention. One group was all about riots and disorder, the other was very secretive in making bombs and selecting targets. Although they were both against the war and the establishment, their ways of going after their goals were very different.
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