To the editors:
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Ben Joravsky’s cover story on Bill Ayers [November 9] proved to me that there is still room in the alternative press for the kind of quality journalism which can tackle the complexity of personal choices made by someone like Ayers without reducing the whole thing to some academic “checklist” of politically correct–or “incorrect”–actions. The fact that Ayers, through and through, is a true radical–radical in his beliefs as well as his actions–invites a far more loaded examination of the issues than you will normally have, and, to his credit, Joravsky allowed the complexity of those issues to come through, without succumbing to pat resolutions to the questions those issues raise. No one can be perfect all the time–but Ayers has made a career of almost always taking the hard way out, because he had a vision of a stronger, braver world that he wanted to bring to life.
Patrick Andes
