Bill Ayers was my nursery school teacher. Seriously.

Below is a letter I sent to the New York Times today:

Letter to the Editor:

What makes a radical? Is it early learning, or your parents beliefs passed along? I am a liberal, yet American to the core, the descendent of passengers on the Mayflower according to my grandmother, yet Bill Ayers was my nursery school teacher. I turned out fine and I’ve never had the inclination to bomb anyone. So when I read, “Senator John McCain joined in the attacks on Thursday on Senator Barack Obama for his ties to the 1960s radical William Ayers as he told an angry, raucous crowd that “we need to know the full extent of the relationship” I feel I must add my two cents. These people do realize that Mr. Obama is a United States Senator, do they not? Not to mention that the Weather Underground was active when Mr. Obama was a child himself.

Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn worked at a day care center called BJ’s Kids on Manhattans’ Upper West Side in the late seventies. Only years later, after Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn had been pardoned by the government did my parents realize who they had been. My mom remembers BJ’s kids as an unruly operation, where she protested the practice of the children being sent home with whatever jacket or mittens happened to be closest, as she had knitted my winter accessories herself. And the time they took all the kids to a No-Nuke demonstration somewhere just outside of the city without letting the parents know in advance about the field trip. I guess I must have been mumbling leftist rhetoric that evening at home and she knew something funny had happened at school that day. Day care centers in the city were hardly regulated back then and many such home-grown operations supported the burgeoning crop of babies from aging hippies like my parents; full disclosure: my mom volunteered for the Chicago Seven during their trial in 1969, writing press releases in Chicago.

So when John McCain and Sarah Palin and others intent on making you forget what this election is really about and bring up Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground, who no one really remembers nowadays anyway, I hope everyone remembers that Barack Obama was a child when the Weather Underground did their dirtiest work. Also that I was a child when Bill Ayers helped me learn to tie my shoes and find my winter mittens, and I am not a terrorist and neither is Barack Obama. The only people looking childish in this situation are, well, John McCain and Sarah Palin. Barack Obama is the only candidate that really has a plan to get this country back on track and I plan to be in Washington to watch him be sworn in to office in January.

- quotation taken from: McCain Questions Obama-Ayers Relationship By Elisabeth Bumiller
October 9, 2008, NYT