Open Letter To Diana Oughton

Diana you carne f rom a fairly wealthy family in Illinois. Private schooling and Bryn Mawr, prestigious. What changed you, set you to evolving into a self-proclaimed enemy of the United States Government? 

Diana: M Some of us in Ann Arbor still remember you. A few I've talked to actually knew you. I've been reading a book which was published in 1971, just months after you died while putting together explosives for use in the war against the system. It's called Diana: The Making Of A Terrorist, by Thomas Powers, and it originated as a series of articles for United Press International. Yes it has that about it, and I had to catch my breath a few times at the way they explained things. But I learned a lot about you and thought it would be nice to tell the people who you were so that we could remember you together in a good way.

Diana you carne from a fairly wealthy family in Illinois. Private schooling and Bryn Mawr, prestigious. What changed you, set you to evolving into a self-proclaimed enemy of the United States Government? It was the time you spent with an organization called VISA. You went to Chichicastenango, Guatemala in 1963. That changed you around forever, didn't it.

The priests told you it was okay to educate the Indians in Quiche province as long as you didn't mention birth control or evolution. Made you stop and consider what exactly was happening. You began to experience shame at being an American. A sense of being overprivileged. You lived frugally and shared what you had with the people around you. There were and still are clearly defined classes. You can see it clearly. The rich are afraid of the poor who hate and envy the rich.

1965. You wrote in a letter home: "When you work at such a basic level with people from a different culture, with different values and different ways of thinking, you really have to seek a common denominator of understanding. Instead of talking about the equality of the races you live with it, get past the hump that many people get stuck on and begin to really look at people as people with needs, happinesses, tragedy. I have to admit grudgingly that I benefited far more than the inhabitants of 'Chichi' from these two years. I've come to a real understanding of that which one might call an ideal, practically gained."

It's been said you no longer believed that American and Guatemalan interests could be reconciled. That you had developed a hunger for simplicity, acquired a kind of moral horror at vanity and affluence in a world where so many still had so little. You brought this perception back to America with you. And you understood that the system needed to be changed.

January 1966. You enrolled in a master of arts program at the U of M School of Education. Thomas Powers wrote: "When Diana entered the University of Michigan it was still a midwestern school where students were inclined to be serious about football, fraternities, weekends and the drinking of beer." That sounds like a pretty good description of the way the campus is today in 1995. Ah, well.

September 1966. You started teaching at the Children's Community School in the basement of the Friends Center on Hill Street. This was an experimental application of A.S. Neill's principles of alternative education as demonstrated at Summerhill. You and Bill Ayers lived together in an attic apartment on McKinley Street, spending much of your time with the kids at CCS. Another teacher there was Skip Taube. I remember him from the Rainbow People's Party in the early seventies. He was good with young folks.

So were you. So was Bill. You had a slogan: CHILDREN ARE ONLY NEWER PEOPLE. One time one of the kids wondered aloud what a dead person looked like so the entire school took a field trip to the morgue in order to share that experience. This was educational experimentation. Not to replace the elementary school in Bums Park but to offer possibilities. And some of us are living results of experimentation. Some of us went to alternative schools for most of our young lives. There's lots to be said for alternatives.

Thank you for doing what you did. It's said that you were deeply hurt when the school closed down in 1968. I think you loved that experiment I wish it had worked better. But it's true, isn't it, that you were interested in preparing children for something other than being spiffy applicants for America's job markets. In fact by 1968 you were seeing a revolution n the making, you thought.

1968. You go forward with the issues and the program begins to congeal. At least it seems as though it's congealing but in any case you get very busy and throw away any privacy you might've had because there's a revolution getting ready to happen and you want to be a part of it, an active participant. You live in a commune on Felch Street. As time passes you feel increasingly dedicated to principles.

SDS was no longer a discussion group. It was a unit structure for revolution and the overthrow of the government. Talk was thick in the air. Dialectics. Factionalism in the movements. And lots of undercover cops. There was blood in the air and I was eleven years old watching the police rioting in Chicago, bashing of heads, televised.

Days Of Rage. Angels of Vengeance. Weatherman. It was a line from Bob Dylan. Subterranean Homesick Blues. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Weatherman said the revolution is already underway in other countries, we can be a part of that struggle right here in the beast's belly. There appeared to be a very good case for armed struggle right here at home.

The Last Poets said on their record: Speak not of revolution until you are willing to eat rats to survive. Che Guevara told the Black Panthers at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, 1964: I speak not out of sympathy with your government but out of reality when I tell you not to try guerilla warfare in this country. This from the same Che who spoke of revolutionaries guided by great feelings of love. Sweet Che.

Weatherman went underground, went dead fucking serious underground, willing to sacrifice everything for the revolution. Wiiling to die for it We've heard a lot about dying for one's beliefs lately, with the anniversaries of World War II battles and bombings. (The people of Dresden, they died for somebody else's beliefs.)

Diana you were willing to risk your life. And you lost your life putting the bombs together in that basement on West Eleventh Street (NYC) on March 6, 1970. Within a year of your death the Weatherpeople were reflecting upon their entire mode of struggle, admitting that they had made "the military mistake" and coming up with the rudimentary visions which I recognize as the philosophy soon adopted by the Rainbow People's Party.

In fact the Rainbow People wanted to rename Gallup Park after you, did you know that? We called it Diana Oughton Park. Maybe we still should, maybe now more than ever. Because you died before you could realize that the strongest part of you was your gifts of empathy and clarity, those are still the strongest elements we have, and there are women as wonderful as you who are continuing the work in ways which are more powerful than any explosives.

Because women are organizing to realign themselves and their world with the real forces of life itself, and we know now that the best way to subvert the monster which lives in the system is to be strong and healthy and humble and lovely like we was born lovely, and listen to the Earth because the Earth is a living being and if we side with the Earth she will side with us. You're very much alive, Diana. Thanks for everything.

Blessed be.