Bill Ayers was a founder of the radical 1960s Weatherman group.

Whew! What was all that mess? I'm still in a daze, sorting it all out, decompressing.

For the past few years, I have gone about my business, hanging out with my kids and, now, my grandchildren, taking care of our elders (they moved in as the kids moved out), going to work, teaching and writing. And every day, I participate in the never-ending effort to build a powerful and irresistible movement for peace and social justice.

In years past, I would now and then – and often unpredictably – appear in the newspapers or on TV, sometimes with a reference to Fugitive Days, my 2001 memoir of the exhilarating and difficult years of resistance against the American war in Vietnam.

Then came this political season.

During the primaries, the blogosphere was full of chatter about my relationship with Barack Obama. We had served together on the board of the Woods Foundation and knew one another as neighbours in Chicago's Hyde Park. In 1996, at a coffee gathering that my wife, Bernardine Dohrn (also a founder of the Weatherman) and I held for him, I made a $200 donation to his campaign for the Illinois state senate.

Obama's rivals and enemies thought they saw an opportunity to deepen a dishonest perception that he is somehow un-American, alien, linked to radical ideas, a closet terrorist who sympathizes with extremism – and they pounced.

On March 13, Senator John McCain, apparently in an attempt to reassure the "base," sat down for an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News. McCain was not yet aware of the narrative Hannity had been spinning for months, and so Hannity filled him in: Ayers is an unrepentant "terrorist," he explained.

"On 9/11, of all days, he had an article where he bragged about bombing our Pentagon, bombing the Capitol and bombing New York City police headquarters. ... He said, `I regret not doing more.'"

McCain couldn't believe it.

Neither could I.

On the campaign trail, McCain immediately got on message. I became a prop, a cartoon character created to be pummelled.

When Alaska Governor Sarah Palin got hold of it, the attack went viral. At a now-famous Oct. 4 rally, she said Obama was "pallin' around with terrorists." (I pictured us sharing a milkshake with two straws.)

The crowd began chanting, "Kill him! Kill him!" It was downhill from there.

My voicemail filled up with hate messages. They were mostly from men, all venting and breathing heavily. A few threats: "Watch out!" and "You deserve to be shot." And I got some emails like this one from satan@hell.com: "I'm coming to get you and when I do, I'll waterboard you."

The police lieutenant who came to copy down those threatsdeadpanned that he hoped the guy who was going to shoot me got there before the guy who was going to waterboard me, since it would be most foul to be tortured and then shot.

The good news was that every time McCain or Palin mentioned my name, they lost a point or two in the polls. The cartoon invented to hurt Obama poked holes in the rapidly sinking McCain-Palin ship.

The McCain-Palin attacks not only involved guilt by association, they also assumed that one must apply a political litmus test to begin a conversation.

In a robust and sophisticated democracy, political leaders – and all of us – ought to seek ways to talk with many people who hold dissenting, or even radical, ideas. Lacking that simple and yet essential capacity to question authority, we might still be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings today.

Maybe we could welcome our current situation – torn by another illegal war, as it was in the '60s – as an opportunity to search for the new.

Perhaps we might think of ourselves not as passive consumers of politics, but as fully mobilized political actors.

Perhaps we might think of our various efforts now, as we did then, as more than a single campaign, but rather as our movement-in-the-making.

We might find hope in the growth of opposition to war and occupation worldwide.

Or we might be inspired by the growing movements for reparations and prison abolition, or the rising immigrant rights movement and the stirrings of working people everywhere, or by gay and lesbian and transgender people courageously pressing for full recognition.

Yet hope – my hope, our hope – resides in a simple self-evident truth: the future is unknown, and it is also entirely unknowable.

History is always in the making. It's up to us. It is up to me and to you. Nothing is predetermined. That makes our moment on this Earth both hopeful and all the more urgent – we must find ways to become real actors, to become authentic subjects in our own history.

In this time of new beginnings and rising expectations, it is even more urgent that we figure out how to become the people we have been waiting to be.

Bill Ayers is a distinguished professor of education and senior scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. This is a condensed version of an essay that first appeared in In These Times (www.inthesetimes.com).