Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
For the Sake of a Future
by Ron Jacobs One of the email lists I belong to is made up of a few former students at the University of Maryland. All of the members were involved somehow in the radical student movement at the university in the 1960s and 1970s.
Much of the listserv discussion is over political questions of the day and the members arguing equipped with a variety of viewpoints across the spectrum.
More interesting in terms of history, however, are the names that occasionally pop up when one or the other member is recalling their glory days. Some of those names include local heroes and renegades while others are the names of nationally known scholars and political figures.
One name that pops up regularly is Cathy Wilkerson. For those
that don't recognize her, Wilkerson was among the leadership of the
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during its heyday. She was the
head of the Washington DC region for SDS and editor of the
organization's newspaper New Left Notes. She was also a member of
Weatherman/Weather Underground.
It is because of that membership that
she was living in her father's townhouse in Manhattan on March 6, 1970
when the building exploded as a result of a wiring mistake during the
building of a bomb by fellow Weatherman members.
Wilkerson is
also the author of a new memoir titled Flying Close to the Sun. This
book is less about the Weather Underground and the bombing than it is
the story of how a young person from a well-off family from the United
states develops a political conscience. It is a personal look at how
one's political growth is also part of one's personal development; how
the development of a moral standard can drive one to accept and commit
actions that seem contradictory to that conscience. It is also a
uniquely personal take on the history of the radical movement in the
United States from the early 1960s until the mid-1970s.
When I
am invited to classes to talk about the Left radical movements of the
aforementioned period, there are always those in the audience who seem
to be looking for some kind of psychological flaw in the members of
those movements. It's as if they are unwilling (or unable) to accept
that people in the United States can become political radicals for
moral and political reasons. This is especially the case when groups
like the Weather Underground are discussed. While Wilkerson's narrative
is strictly her narrative, it relates a trajectory not very different
from most middle-class and wealthy members of U.S. radical movements.
It is the story of hopes dashed by elected leaders preaching democracy,
frustration with supposedly democratic channels that do more to prolong
war and racism than end those ills, and the growing awareness of the
power of the people. Furthermore, it is the story of the moral
dissonance created upon realizing your family's financial wellbeing
depends on other families' misery. It's a tale of frustration with the
fact that power in the United States is directly related to wealth and
the amorality of that wealth and the pursuit of ever more wealth it
requires to exist.
At times, exciting and at other times
reflective, Flying Close to the Sun is always captivating. Her
descriptions of undercover police activities against SDS show the
seriousness of the government's fear. The discussions of her internal
emotional and intellectual conflicts complement the descriptions of the
political discussions within the movement while simultaneously
providing the reader with a different understanding of how the personal
does become intertwined with the political. Like most activists of her
age, Wilkerson's radical politics were directly related to the
discovery that racism was not only entrenched in U.S. society, but
essential to its development. This realization came through her
observation , then participation in the civil rights movement that
eventually ended legal apartheid in the country. In the minds of many
activists that came of age around the same time as Wilkerson, there was
nothing that white skinned people could do that would be enough to end
racism's bloody and terrible legacy.
While this perception is
crucial to understanding the nature of the U.S. economy and its
accompanying governmental policies, the guilt-driven desperation this
analysis often brought was part of what fueled the decision by many
white activists to reject anything having to do with that legacy. It is
a decision that Wilkerson acknowledges helped place her fellow
revolutionaries in Weather outside of the movement. It's not that many
in the movement didn't agree with the essential nature of Weather's
argument that ending racism was core to ending oppression and creating
a new world, it's that they didn't share Weather's frustrated rage that
tended to go nowhere. Wilkerson takes a look at Weather's macho
posturing and examines her reasons for going along with it despite her
misgivings. She writes critically about the results of the lack of a
structure in SDS and the resultant hierarchical relationship between
the Weather leadership and the various cadre. In addition, she examines
the nature of revolutionary violence and its validity in the long term.
There are several books out now that look at the legacy of the
Weather Underground Organization. Some are histories by outsiders and
some are memoirs (including the recently republished With the
Weatherman by Susan Stern). All of them are good reads and useful to
the serious and casual historian. In addition, they provide several
relevant insights to today's radicals regarding the pitfalls of
organizing in the belly of the beast. Wilkerson's stands out among all
of these books for its thoughtfulness, carefully worded discussions and
the fact that it is the narrative of a woman's involvement in this most
interesting period of history. For those that don't like straight
history but want to know more about this particular period, Flying
Close to the Sun might be your best bet.
Writings 
One of the email lists I belong to is made up of a few former students at the University of Maryland. All of the members were involved somehow in the radical student movement at the university in the 1960s and 1970s. 
Subscribe to this comment's feed
