Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers

Images from Gaza crowd into the available space, disrupting sleep, shattering the calm, demanding to be taken into account.Dead children and babies piled upon one another, body parts littering a hell-scape of demolished homes and apartment buildings, collapsed bridges and towers, refugee centers burned to the ground, hospitals in utter ruin.This is not justice; this is the face of fury, of vengeance unleashed. This is the face of genocide.

Charles Dickens would recognize our predicament at once: the winter of despair and the spring of hope; an age of foolishness and an age of wisdom; Darkness in combat with Light. Life is never one thing isolated from every other thing; a lot of things can be—and are—happening at once. Contradiction—the dynamic, noisy, frenetic magnificence of life as it’s actually lived—is the universal experience of humanity.We’re fortunate to be joined by the smart and inspiring organizer/activist/artist Astra Taylor, someone willing to dive into rather than run away from contradiction as she illuminates both our problems and our possibilities in new ways. Taylor is a founding member of the Debt Collective and author, most recently, of The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart. Taylor’s work—and this conversation—is an antidote to despair and a call to action.

A group of Chicago writers brought together by the worker/owners of Pilsen Community Books gathered to support and raise resources for our comrades in Atlanta fighting to Stop Cop City. But events ran ahead of us, as they often do, and by the time we gathered, the preannounced genocide against the Palestinian people was in full swing. The connections were clear: militarism and violence abroad, out-of-control militarized police forces at home; land seizures and occupation everywhere; repression and the violent suppression of dissent. We stood up and spoke out—for an immediate ceasefire, for an end to the genocide in Gaza and the murderous violence in the West Bank, for an end to Cop City in Atlanta, for self-determination for the Palestinian people and for an end to US aid to Israel.Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years War Against PalestineNathan Thrall, One Day in the Life of Abed SalamaThe One Democratic State Initiative Ta-Nehisi Coates on Israeli ApartheidOn Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism and Dangerous Conflations from Jewish Voice for Peace, and antisemitismcurriculum.org/ 

A favorite political poster hangs on a wall in my office: “Homeland Security” it proclaims in bold letters above a photo of a group of Indigenous elders holding rifles; below it reads, “Fighting Terrorism Since 1492.”It’s a reminder of the centuries of settler colonial policy and genocidal terror carried out by the US government against Indigenous peoples and nations and lineages, as well as the natural environment, the trees, the bison, and more. And it’s a reminder that resistance goes back to the beginning and continues to this day.This episode of Under the Tree—a conversation with Mneesha Gellman, author of Indigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom: Cultural Survival in Mexico and the United States  which explores the contemporary fight for Indigenous language in the classroom as a site of struggle and resistance against erasure and genocide—was recorded at the courageous, worker-owned bookstore, Pilsen Community Books, a familiar and friendly stop on our Chicago freedom tour.

Listeners of Under the Tree are well aware of the fact that the US is a Prison Nation, with over 2,000,000 people locked inside cages every day, aware, as well,  that we are abolitionists involved in the movement-making and world-building work that will one day make prisons obsolete. But the carceral state is a many-legged monster with dangerous tentacles stretching out in every direction—there are now over 4,000,000 people under state supervision, on parole or probation. It’s an enormously expensive enterprise that does nothing to reduce risk to society while creating enormous hazards for anyone coming home or caught in its web. One in four people caged today is locked up for a violation (curfew, association, failure to report, and more). This episode—a conversation with Vinnie Schiraldi, author of Mass Supervision: Probation, Parole, and the Illusion of Safety and Freedom, and friend-of the-pod Renaldo Hudson—was recorded at the intrepid, worker-owned bookstore, Pilsen Community Books, a familiar and favorite haunt of ours.

These are terrible times—escalating wars, racialized police violence, environmental collapse on full display, democratic institutions on life support, bodily integrity under 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 world-wide 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. Life is never one thing in isolation of every other thing. Yes, there is oppression, but there is also resistance. And, yes, the predatory heart of capitalism is incorrigibly avaricious, aching to transform everything within reach into a profit-generating commodity: teaching and learning are turned into the education business, human health morphs into the healthcare industry, art is transfigured into the art market. But our imaginations, nourished and unleashed, have the capacity to “light the slow fuse of possibility.” And our resistance fuels our imaginations.I met up at the Socialism 2023 Conference with Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin, the editors of Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century. It’s the latest in the series initiated and inspired by Howard Zinn’s ground-breaking work. Their subtitle, “Documents of Hope and Resistance” perfectly captures the tone, the feel, and the content of this great book—hope is a discipline, resistance is a necessity.BONUS: A short conversation with two of the Tampa Five, students arrested and on trial for fighting back against the reactionary attacks on schools, colleges, and universities in Florida.

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.