Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers

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 poli...

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 i...

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...

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 pow...

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...

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 h...

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 Fi...

“If we have to use force,” former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously said, “it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation.” A benign interpretation of that extravagant claim might visualize the country as a shining city on the hill, the very paragon of democracy and freedom; a more realistic assessment sees the US holding itself above international laws—including the...

Unchecked, the US juggernaut is headed for catastrophe, either a new and friendly-looking American fascism, or some other form of extreme social disintegration. Another world is surely coming—greater equality, socialism, participatory democracy, and peace are all within our reach, but nuclear war, complete capitalist climate collapse, work camps and slavery are also looming possibilities. There ar...

One of Karl Marx’s most famous dictums is carved onto his gravestone: “The philosophers have only  interpreted  the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to  change  it.” The first step is opening our eyes, making meaning, making sense,  interpreting  and constructing a world. Another step is allowing ourselves to feel the world throbbing inside of us, to hea...

This political moment—complex, contradictory, and characterized by escalating crises—urges us to focus our attention on movement building. Beyond campaigns, projects, policies, or organizations, we need to find multiple ways to weave our work together into a sturdy quilt, or a mighty and irresistible social upheaval that advances the cause of peace and freedom, joy and justice in our time. I’m joi...

The struggle for Black Freedom was intensifying in 1966, and when the term “Black Power!” leapt from the March Against Fear in Mississippi into the mainstream, the Freedom Movement was newly energized. White supremacist hearts were all aflutter, and Mister Backlash went into overdrive with the usual bullshit: Black Power is hate! Is racist! Is destructive! Is too extreme! We’re joined in conversat...

What’s the worst thing you ever did in your life? OK, stop blushing, and be honest. Are you sure you haven’t repressed, suppressed, and forgotten the most unkind or terrible or illegal or unjust things you’ve done? Think harder. What were the consequences of your actions for others, and for yourself? I’m joined in conversation with Michael Fischer, a brilliant writer and teacher who probes his own...

We’re in a five-alarm shit-storm of trouble to be sure, and the overlapping crises can feel overwhelming— racial reckoning, catastrophic capitalist climate collapse, a financial system that parodies a massive, out-of-control Ponzi scheme, a legislature impersonating a medieval auction block, and more. We meet up with Danny Katch to help us name this political moment. Danny offers a delightful...

It takes a lot to change the world, and because we live day-by-day immersed in what is—the world as such—imagining a landscape much different from what’s immediately before us requires a combination of some things: seeds, surely, desire, yes, effort, of course, always effort, idealism and romance, maybe, necessity and desperation at times, and a vision of dazzling possibilities at other times. Occ...

A border can be “a story of identity” or “a wound…in the landscape.” It is sometimes a place to be feared, and other times a place to be honored. Borders can, of course, be metaphors: the boundary between boy and man, or girl and woman; the thin line between sanity and madness; the final frontier between life and death. In any case, a border, as the journalist James Crawford writes, “is never simp...

Stephanie Skora is the force behind the   Girl, I Guess   Progressive Voter Guide. She's  a self-proclaimed 'Jewish, queer, trans, nerd' dedicated to helping members of the community navigate confusing ballot races and identify the most progressive candidates. A grouchy Jewish trans dyke, and an anarchist  with a political science degree  – Stephanie is as wise and witty a...

We travel to the Illinois Parole Board to stand in solidarity with a couple of my students seeking clemency or commutation or a pardon from Governor Pritzger, and to support our friend and colleague Marshan Allen as he asks to have his conviction erased so that he can practice law when he finishes law school. Since coming home after 24-years in prison, Marshan Allen earned his Bachelor's Degr...

We’re joined in conversation with the philosopher, youth organizer, and innovative educator Theodore Richards at the legendary destination bookstore 57th Street Books in Hyde Park, Chicago. He and I have shared the mic at half a dozen book talks over the years, and today our focus is on his latest book,  Reimagining the Classroom: Creating New Learning Spaces and Connecting with the World,&nb...

This is our last Episode for 2022—we look forward to being back in mid-January. For this Special Episode, we’re joined in conversation with the legendary activist and organizer Helen Shiller at the 57th Street Bookstore in Hyde Park, Chicago. In her new autobiography,  Daring to Struggle, Daring to Win , Shiller captures a sense of what it means to engage in decades of justice work from anti-...

Authentic learning requires free thought—curiosity, inquiry, imagination, initiative, problem-posing, question-asking. Learning is undermined when students are inspected, spied upon, regulated, appraised, censured, measured, registered, counted, admonished, checked off, prevented, and sermonized. In this episode, we visit a unique college commencement ceremony—filled with joy and pain—and explore...

An authentic education rests on the twin pillars of enlightenment and liberation—it’s about opening doors, opening minds, and opening possibilities; the principal message to students is straight forward: you can explore, interrogate, and understand your world, and, working together, you can change it. Schooling is too often about judging and sorting students into a hierarchy of winners and losers....

We are a few days away from election day across the country and many of us here in Chicago are looking at our mail-in or early ballots, and are overwhelmed with the incredible number of offices, ballot measures, and judges about whom we are expected to make informed decisions. So who are all these people on the ballot, and does it even matter who we vote for anymore? Let’s talk about it!

Americans want to think of ourselves as peace-loving people, but the facts contradict the myth: US military bases stretch around the globe; nuclear weapons poised to strike from flying fortresses circle the earth; the US is the top global arms dealer as well as Number One in the world in terms of military spending; and we live in a permanent war economy with the largest corporate welfare prog...

We want our children to face the world fearlessly, but we also want them to be careful. We want them to embrace all the joy and ecstasy life has to offer them, and also to be aware of the unnecessary suffering human beings endure. We want our children to know the truth, and we want to protect them from the horrors. We talk about all of this and more with Anastasia Higginbotham, author, artist, and...