Posted on 11/14/2007 9:16:36 PM PST by neverdem
On a brisk November morning, Cathy Wilkerson strides down one of the city’s finest streets, 11th between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, her glance sweeping across the row of handsome town houses, alighting nowhere in particular. “The street I remember,” Ms. Wilkerson says, “was a lot less polished.”
If streets had memories, this one would recall a far less polished incarnation of her.
On the morning of March 6, 1970, Cathy Wilkerson stumbled onto 11th Street in tatters, bleeding and her clothes all but ripped off her body. Her father’s town house, 18 West 11th Street, which she had borrowed on a ruse, had just been blown to pieces, killing three members of the Weatherman group who were building bombs in the basement.
After the explosion, Ms. Wilkerson lived underground for 10 years, surrendering in 1980 and serving less than a year in prison; the only other survivor, Kathy Boudin, was captured in 1981 during the robbery of a Brink’s truck in which three people were murdered.
For many, the town house explosion defined the instant when the highest-octane rhetoric of the era was dismally realized in the rubble of the pulverized house and the bodies of three young people. It sobered — though did not completely halt — the most violent of radicals.
And in the annals of New York life, the 11th Street explosion had its own peculiar niche: The house had been built by a founder of Merrill Lynch, and was next door to the home of the actor Dustin Hoffman, whose desk fell into the rubble.
Until now, neither Ms. Wilkerson nor Ms. Boudin have spoken publicly about the events. Now Ms. Wilkerson has written a memoir, “Flying Close to the Sun,” which unsparingly maps the idealism, fanaticism, moral absolutism and personal passions that carried...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
“Hey, Dad, can I borrow the townhouse for a few weeks?”
“Sure, Pumpkin. Just don’t blow the place up, ok?”
Does the NY Times mean the “Weather Underground” or the “Weathermen” when it tosses around the phrase “the Weatherman”?!
the weathermen were the progeny of Tom Haydens bunch of commies................
http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/huron.html
Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, 1962
Courtesy Office of Sen. Tom Hayden.
snipped:
* these together make the university a potential base and agency in a movement of social change.
1. Any new left in America must be, in large measure, a left with real intellectual skills, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection as working tools. The university permits the political life to be an adjunct to the academic one, and action to be informed by reason.
2. A new left must be distributed in significant social roles throughout the country. The universities are distributed in such a manner.
3. A new left must consist of younger people who matured in the postwar world, and partially be directed to the recruitment of younger people. The university is an obvious beginning point.
4. A new left must include liberals and socialists, the former for their relevance, the latter for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms in the system. The university is a more sensible place than a political party for these two traditions to begin to discuss their differences and look for political synthesis.
5. A new left must start controversy across the land, if national policies and national apathy are to be reversed. The ideal university is a community of controversy, within itself and in its effects on communities beyond.
6. A new left must transform modern complexity into issues that can be understood and felt close-up by every human being. It must give form to the feelings of helplessness and indifference, so that people may see the political, social and economic sources of their private troubles and organize to change society. In a time of supposed prosperity, moral complacency and political manipulation, a new left cannot rely on only aching stomachs to be the engine force of social reform. The case for change, for alternatives that will involve uncomfortable personal efforts, must be argued as never before. The university is a relevant place for all of these activities.
But we need not indulge in allusions: the university system cannot complete a movement of ordinary people making demands for a better life. From its schools and colleges across the nation, a militant left might awaken its allies, and by beginning the process towards peace, civil rights, and labor struggles, reinsert theory and idealism where too often reign confusion and political barter. The power of students and faculty united is not only potential; it has shown its actuality in the South, and in the reform movements of the North.
The bridge to political power, though, will be built through genuine cooperation, locally, nationally, and internationally, between a new left of young people, and an awakening community of allies. In each community we must look within the university and act with confidence that we can be powerful, but we must look outwards to the less exotic but more lasting struggles for justice.
To turn these possibilities into realities will involve national efforts at university reform by an alliance of students and faculty. They must wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy. They must make fraternal and functional contact with allies in labor, civil rights, and other liberal forces outside the campus. They must import major public issues into the curriculum — research and teaching on problems of war and peace is an outstanding example. They must make debate and controversy, not dull pedantic cant, the common style for educational life. They must consciously build a base for their assault upon the loci of power.
As students, for a democratic society, we are committed to stimulating this kind of social movement, this kind of vision and program is campus and community across the country. If we appear to seek the unattainable, it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.
These are the original moonbats, a real bunch of kooks, predecessors to today’s code pink crowd. The Weathermen Underground was born out of SDS, a bunch of commies who hated (and probably still hate) America. These freaks blamed the U.S.A. and our “bourgeois” capitalist system for thwarting their world socialist “utopia”.
There’s a sympathetic documentary on Netflix called “The Weather Underground” that you can watch online. Even though the movie attempts to sugarcoat it, you can still smell the commie stench of the rotten pink-o’s and it is pretty informative.
View at your own discretion because it might make you sick. Still, this will give you a good look at the roots of modern moonbaticism. If you have Netflix, you might enjoy it.
http://www.netflix.com/Movie/60029983?trkid=73
touche’
So, are we supposed to feel sorrow for her? Or outrage that she basically got away with it?
I think I’ll pass on her book.
From her comments in the article she gives the impression that it was all a bunch of BS. I don’t think she’s wanting us to feel sorry for her, I think she’s essentially saying ‘I was a naive idiot’.
She should be facing the needle instead of 11th Street.
More of the lowdown on The Weather Underground/Weathermen and two of
their number that the bomb missed.
But still got good teaching gigs!
WEATHERMAN
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6808
BILL AYERS
(VOA’s title: Weatherman, revolutionary, Professor of Education and
Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois, Chicago)
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2169
BERNARDINE DOHRN
(VOA’s title: Lady Weatherman, revolutionary,
Professor at Northwestern University Law School)
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2190
In the sixties there was a whole load of crap to fall for. She fell harder than most. Looking back, the nonsense from that period ate up a good deal of my own life.
“President Bill Clinton pardoned both women in January 2001.”
Well, at least Bubba was an equal-opportunity pardoner for domestic terrorists...
with pardoning those Puerto Rican guys.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_pardons_controversy
Don't hold your breath ... this time!
Maybe when the real debates happen, but not yet ........................... FRegards
“you can still smell the commie stench” lol.
Seems I recall some other young women from the era who fell under the spell of Charles Manson.
Last I heard, they are asking for clemency and expressing remorse now too. Their original sentence was death.
I wonder if he required any special favors from them.
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