Just finished listening to the interview. Always a pleasure to hear~study~process Bill's thoughts and feelings - and I'm sure that Bill, eternally humble and honest would protest here and say "they're not MY thoughts and feelings, they're the collective product of millions of people who have forged them together in love and struggle within the context the US and global Liberation Movement."

I did find the voice and manner of Rosie Charalambous to be on the irritating side. She used "the Voice" (best described in the "Dune" book series by Frank Herbert) as an instrument of authority and manipulation. She also interrupted way too much, and used misdirection to spin the message in sideways directions. I don't know Rosie, and this is the first time I've ever heard her. Seeing her photo here
www.plaxo.com/directory/profile/227634982103/a1bc2c10/Rosie/Charalambous ,
I can see that she probably means well and does these things perhaps without even realizing it, thinking that this how it "should" be.

Anyway, her tone showed that she came into the encounter with the wrong preconceptions and did not have the courage to admit that when it became revealed that Bill was not the caricature "radical bomber" she had thought she was going to force into "confronting his violent past" or lure into "regretting the folly of his youth", blah, blah.

She did not face up to reality while the talk was going on, and kept trying to bait her guest by setting smart-ass "provocative" questions. I wish she had the patience to hear the answers.

I don't think she's a bad person, but her approach to the interview showed that having an intimidating voice and p r e t e n d i n g to understand the issues are not the only sins here; she also needs to improve on her listening and comprehension skills.

Bill, and friends,
the road is long. There's several billion replicas of Rosie within peoples' heads; simulacra, automatons, the machine Voice of Authority that's part of the social~personal~spiritual illness of our era that keeps people in the double role of being each other's prisoners and jailers, sim ultaneously.

The Voice says No, DO NOT act, don't feel, don't think anything except what is prepackaged by the double headed monster of Corporate Capital and the authoritarian State. The Voice says Love, Work, Play, equality, meaning, freedom… NONE of them shall exist unless we allow them in a particular form that will serve the system of Holy Profits and the power of the Corporate State.

The terrible task we face in our era is how to connect with people who are outside the influence of The Voice - people who are in motion - and help them turn that motion into Movement. How to help them - and help ourselves - connect and reconnect meaningfully to the Liberation process within collective efforts and popular mobilizations that are aimed at both reform and revolution driven by Love and necessity, nurtured by liberated Love, Work and Play invested heartily in everything we do on that path.

The Weather Underground helped forge a version of that Path that was appropriate to that specific time and place and still mostly is, if a mass movement were to be re-electrified in the present time, with new tactics and new approaches of course, but retaining all the original values and principles… But what of the present time in the absence of such conditions?

And what about us in the "Third World", "developing world", the "global south", “global colonies” (please use whichever concept applies), how do we proceed with this knowledge, how do we forge it into a theory and practice that can be an actual – experiencible! - path to freedom?

Those of us who face military and economic occupation of our countries, ethnic cleansing, sexual repression coupled with sexual degeneracy (sadism, sexploitation, anti-gay and misogynist sexual violence, behaviours and ideologies embedded in all official institutions), economic stagnation and economic dependency on foreign Finance Capital, and our populations drunk on merchandise, confused about what Freedom really is (“freedom is my right to blow cigarette smoke in your face, right?”), those of us facing all these conditions plaguing and enslaving our communities have a long way to go before we find some set of actions and patterns of community organizing that can help our people become re-oriented, self-organized, self-sufficient, and regain our collective ability to survive and well, maybe even become free.

How do we get there? Bill’s thoughts - and the prime concepts and instinctual directions of a community organizer that are underlying his words - are very valuable items to guide us in the right (“the other right”, the correct) directions. But I know he’d say “no, no, don’t just take my words and try to apply them, take the principles, take the underlying foundations and build on them, build with them, add your own elements and build your own versions of what the 21st century Weather Underground and Aboveground mobilizations should be, and make them appropriate to and harmonious with the realities of your own communities, your own countries, your own personal and collective here and now.”

We just need to process it all a little more, a little deeper.

My deep and profound gratitude to Bill Ayers and to all our other friends, lovers and comrades whose presence is felt travelling with Bill’s voice - and to Nikoleta for facilitating all this.

Petros
petros-evdokas.cyprus-org.net/Another-sort-of-Introduction.html
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