(Preface:) For twenty-five years I'd avoided talking about my past. During that time I hat made an entirely new life in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as a teacher, father of two, intermittent husband, and perennial community activist. But in a short few months, two seemingly unrelated events came together to make me change my mind and begin speaking in public about my role in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Weather Underground - things that happened to me when I was a kid. First, in March 2003, the United States attacked Iraq, beginning a bloody, long, and futile war of conquest. What I saw, despite some significant differences, was Vietnam all over again. As a reflex I joined the antiwar movement with millions of others, just as I had done thirty-eight years before, when I was eighteen years old. From 1965 to 1968, the years of the big escalation of the Vietnam War and the maturation of the civil-rights movement, I was a member of SDS at Columbia University in New York City, one among many hundreds who made as much noise and trouble as possible to protest the university's pro-war and racist policies. The organizing was good and the time was right, so the campus blew up in April 1968 with the largest student protest up to that point. Having been recently elected chairman of the Columbia chapter of SDS, I was identified by the press as the strike's top leader; the impudent young twenty-year-old with the megaphone. The cartoonist Garry Trudeau even created a Doonesbury character modeled after me, Megaphone Mark, a true icon of the sixties. As both the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement grew red hot, I went over the cliff with a tiny fragment of the much larger SDS. We thought we were living a line from the Rolling Stones song "Street Fighting Man": "Think the time is right for a Palace Revolution / But where I live the game to play is Compromise Solution." My friends and I formed an underground revolutionary guerilla band called Weatherman which had as its goal the violent overthrow of the United States government. Confirmed idealists, we wanted to end the underlying system that produced war and racism. It didn't work. From 1970 to 1977, I was a federal fugitive, living the whole time underground inside this country. Just a few months after the Iray War began, the documentary movie The Weather Underground was released. The project of two young men then in their thirties, Sam Green and Bill Siegel, the movie had been more than five years in the making. I am featured both as a contemporary talking head and also in archival footage as a twenty-year-old revolutionary. Nominated for an Academy Award and broadcast nationally on PBS, the movie has been a great success with audiences and critics; it remains in circulation as a DVD and continues to be shown frequently in college and high-school classes, stimulating much comment and many questions. The closing images of the movie show me as a befuddled, grayhaired, overweight, middle-aged guy observing that thirty years later I still don't know what to do with my knowledge of who we are in the world; then the film cuts to aerial shots of carpet bombing in Vietnam and, finally, to a close-up of a skinny twenty-two-year-old kid, the same guy, with the same grief-stricken look on my face. This ending hits audiences like a blade going right to the existential gut of our problem. In the years since 2003, I've spoken and answered questions at scores of colleges, high schools, community centers, and theaters about why my friends and I opted for violent revolution, how I've changed my thinking and how I haven't, and, most of all, about the parallels between then and now. Young audiences are hungry to know this history, sensing its relevance to today. They seem genuinely amazed to learn that once there was a group of young white kids from priviledged backgrounds who risked everything for our antiwar, anti-racist, and revolutionary beliefs, to act "in solidarity with the people of the world. Sometimes passion doesn't rule the day. In The Weather Underground, I say I haven't wanted to talk about my past because of my "guilt and shame". I never get to explain what I'm guilty and ashamed of, but it's implied: Much of what the Weathermen did had the opposite effect of what we intended. We deorganized SDS while we claimed we were making it stronger; we isolated ourselves from our friends and allies as we helped split the larger antiwar movement around the issue of violence. In general, we played into the hands of the FBI - our sworn enemies. We might as well have been on their payroll. As if all this weren't enough, three of my friends died in an accidential explosion while assembling bombs. This is not a heroic story, if anything, it's antiheroic. Having made such disastrous mistakes on such a big level - even granted that I was twenty years old at the time - I spent decades doubting my judgement. It took me a long time to sort out what was right from what was wrong in my own history. But in conversations with young people since 2003, I've found that Weatherman's failures are less important to them than the simple astonishing fact that we existed. As a result of this ongoing dialogue I've shifted my opinion some about my own past, and in doing so I've rediscovered a voice that I bottled up for two and a half decades - longer than most of the people I was speaking to have been alive. I've also reclaimed what I can be proud of: Along with millions of other people, I was part of a movement of history - that's what a "movement" is, after all, a shift of history caused by millions - that helped end the war in Vietnam. Combined with the civil-rights movement, the period was American democracy's finest hour. Historical movements aren't made of heroes, just ordinary people trying to do right. The movements of the sixties succeeded in transforming laws and practices concerning the position of black and other minority people in this country, and they helped stop a major war of aggression by our own government. That sucessful mass movements happened in my lifetime tells me they can happen again. The election of Barack Obama has liberated young people's political imagination and energy. I hope my story helps them figure out what they can do to build a more just and peaceful world. At the very least, it might show some serious pitfalls to avoid.

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