Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers

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.

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.