Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers

These are terrible times—an escalating cold war with China, a proxy war in Europe, racialized police violence unchecked, environmental collapse on full display, fragile and often anemic democratic institutions on life support, religious authoritarianism on the rise, women’s bodily integrity under sustained assault. On the other hand—26 million people poured into the streets in response to the police murder of George Floyd, women across a wide political spectrum have refused to accept a medieval definition of their rights, and broad forces are on the march worldwide to resist plunder and extraction, and to preserve life on earth. Charles Dickens would recognize the contradiction: the winter of despair and the spring of hope; an age of foolishness and an age of wisdom; Darkness locked in combat with Light. Life is never one thing in isolation from every other thing. Yes, there is oppression, but there is also art—and our imaginations, nourished and unleashed—which has the capacity to “light the slow fuse of possibility.” With Lisa Yun Lee, my comrade and friend for many years and co-host for this episode, I’m in conversation with Claire Dederer about her smart and important new book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma.

We’re bombarded with relentless and punishing propaganda that places the US at the epicenter of the whole wide world. We are the exceptional nation, it says, the indispensable nation, the most remarkable people who ever lived, a shining beacon on a hill to the lesser nations. The propaganda is so unremitting that it can take on the color of common sense—and there’s nothing more dogmatic and insistent than common sense. Breaking with that dogma requires a conscious effort to open your eyes, to see the world large, and to reach out in solidarity. We’re joined by Destine Phillips, Beth Awano, and Eliza Gonring, three comrades from Chicago who journeyed to Palestine to study, learn, and join hands in our common struggle against settler colonialism.

We were at the Winter Garden of the Harold Washington Library  this month for the launch of  “Help This Garden Grow,” a new docuseries that tells the story of Hazel Johnson, a visionary of the Environmental Justice movement and a resident of the Altgeld Gardens community on the far South Side of Chicago. “Help This Garden Grow” is a project of Respair, a liberatory ecosystem hub brought to life by an entire community, and spearheaded by my mentors in media, the visionaries Damon Williams and Daniel Kisslinger. Respair Production and Media (RPM) creates and builds media projects in partnership with social justice movement-makers, visionaries, and creatives who are taking stock of the world as it is, and working relentlessly to create a world that could be or should be, but is not yet. Over the past few years AirGo has made its mark as a unique space of movement-building, opening critical conversations, deepening our understanding of fundamental questions, connecting people and linking issues. Respair represents a qualitative leap forward, spinning off new media projects in all directions. One example is the podcast “Guaranteed” with the incomparable Eve Ewing. Another is “Help This Garden Grow,” and I’m honored to have been asked to help launch this docuseries by broadcasting Episode One. Here it is.Subscribe to listen to the entire docuseries by searching “Help This Garden Grow” wherever you get your podcasts, and you can find out much more about the project at respairmedia.com.

For millennia and all over the world fire was a powerful tool in the hands of Indigenous peoples. As they stewarded the land generation after generation, fire was understood to be a natural and necessary element for an abundant world—fire was regeneration and revitalization. But fire was taken away from Native people and handed over to agencies and bureaus who never grasped the positive power of fire. With typical arrogance and ignorance the powerful and the policy makers made fire an enemy to be destroyed—they developed the policy of 100% fire suppression which created the monster we live with today: a towering accumulation of fuels, and recurring catastrophic fires of earth-shaking proportions. In California, state and federal agencies are beginning to work with Tribes to shift how fires (and fuels) are managed, but public understanding of the fire paradox and pressure is needed to change long-standing failed policies. We’re joined today by Will Harling and Leif Carlson for a discussion of fire and freedom.

The forest is disappearing—it’s becoming a ghost—and along with its entire ecosystems. This is not something distant from us; it is us—the power of a tree is the air we breathe. Two and a half billion years ago enough oxygen had built up on earth to support multicellular life, and the first trees evolved about 400,000,000 years ago. The first primates appeared fifty-five million years ago, living in trees in the rain forests. In the past 10,000 years, the earth lost one-third of its forest—almost all of it in the last few hundred years. And the recent loss is caused, not by ice and fire and ice or earthquakes and volcanoes, but by the deliberate acts of human beings. We’re talking in his Arcata home with an extraordinary writer/activist named Greg King, author most recently of The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods. 

The Palestinian people’s ongoing struggle  for self-determination and basic human rights has appropriately drawn the attention and support of freedom lovers the world around. Invasion and occupation, ethnic cleansing and segregation as both policy and law are all part of the continuing and everyday catastrophe. Rick Ayers co-hosts this episode, and we’re both grateful to be joined from her home in the Galilee by an inspiring writer, Fida Jiryis, as she tells the story of Palestine through a beautiful and haunting memoir of her family's journey—Stranger in my own Land.

Young people in many parts of the country are denied decent school facilities, honest and forward-looking curriculum, and fully qualified teachers, but the fundamental injury they face is the deliberate and systematic suppression of freedom. They have endured institutions—not only schools, but the cops and La Migra, the courts and the hospitals—that routinely disregard their humanity. These are First Nations students or the descendants of formerly enslaved and African-ancestored people or recent immigrants from poor countries; they’re from working-class families and they’ve attended schools of poverty; many have participated in a sort of general strike and run away from those schools. What could it mean and how would it look if these young folks were to mobilize themselves in order to articulate their own desires, their own demands and dreams, and pursue their own questions? We’re joined in conversation with Rick Ayers, a life-long freedom fighter and legendary teacher.

“If we have to use force,” former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously said, “it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation.” A benign interpretation of that extravagant claim might visualize the country as a shining city on the hill, the very paragon of democracy and freedom; a more realistic assessment sees the US holding itself above international laws—including the use of lethal force, invasion, and occupation—that govern all others.  We’ll consider the role of US imperialism both historically and in the contemporary world over at the incomparable  Pilsen Community Books with the legendary activist/journalist Juan Gonzalez, co-host of Democracy Now! and author of the now classic Harvest of Empire. We are overjoyed that Juan and his partner Lilia Fernandez have recently moved to Chicago—we welcome them and celebrate them.

Unchecked, the US juggernaut is headed for catastrophe, either a new and friendly-looking American fascism, or some other form of extreme social disintegration. Another world is surely coming—greater equality, socialism, participatory democracy, and peace are all within our reach, but nuclear war, complete capitalist climate collapse, work camps and slavery are also looming possibilities. There are choices and options before us—where do we go from here, chaos or community? I’m joined by Jon Melrod at Pilsen Community Books in conversation about his life as a student and labor organizer, and his memoir Fighting Times.

One of Karl Marx’s most famous dictums is carved onto his gravestone: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” The first step is opening our eyes, making meaning, making sense, interpreting and constructing a world. Another step is allowing ourselves to feel the world throbbing inside of us, to hear its rhythmic heart-beat in sync with our own—to be astonished at all the beauty and splendor and magnificence available in all directions, as well as all the unnecessary suffering and undeserved pain. And then, acting in response to what the known demands of us—to do something. This takes us into the realm of strategy and tactics where we state our aims and objectives and values, make and implement a plan, and organize ourselves for action. I’m joined at Pilsen Community Books in conversation with the brilliant thinker and writer Clément Petitjean in a far-ranging conversation about his important new book, Occupation: Organizer, and the challenge of organizing to change the world.