If an adult man marries and impregnates a 14-year-old girl, is he a child rapist? What if this union occurred in the 1600s, when in Europe and America this was culturally accepted practice? 

I use this example to illustrate that terms evolve in meaning and as a lead in to Bill Ayers's Saturday op-ed in The New York Times. The 60s-radical-turned-English-prof who became the "domestic terrorist" McCain/Palin et. al. alleged that Barack Obama was "pallin' around with" had this to say about his militant past:  

I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices — the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious — as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.

The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be — and still is being — debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war.

Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.

So he basically says yes, I planted bombs, but I didn't kill anyone. It's "extreme vandalism", not terrorism.  

Perhaps Ayers is part right?  Is it possible that which was in the 1960s considered an act of vandalism is now an act of terrorism?  I reject that Ayers is simply an “extreme vandal”, but if, in the 1960s, he intended his explosives to be acts of vandalism, if they were seen at the times by the public as acts of desecration and not as acts of mass human destruction, and the contemporary way in which we understand terrorism had not yet been created, then there isn’t a defined binary here.

Certainly if the Pentagon bombing was done today it would be rightly labeled an act of terror. And, because the world has changed and we interpret certain acts in new, previously unrealized ways, we see the past through the lens of our modern understanding. But perhaps what Ayers did is both vandalism and terrorism?

There were times in this country (some very recent times, like 40 years ago in places) when the killing of a Black person was not murder.  If in 1820 I killed an African slave in Georgia, it is doubtful that neither I nor others in my community would have considered that an act of murder. Yet no one here would dispute the label of murder today.

On the other hand, we tend to excuse plenty of historical actions and attitudes because "that's just how things were back then".  Were your male ancestors who married and impregnated 14 & 15 year old girls child rapists? Or are they off the hook because they were a product of their times?

My point is not to exonerate Bill Ayers. Even if I agree with his desire to end the fraudulent Vietnam War, the rules say you can't bomb stuff like the Pentagon.  All I'm saying is that to accurately classify Bill Ayers, one needs to take into account the whole of the 60s, what everyone else was doing at the time, the pro-war and anti-war crowds, the pro-civil rights and anti-civil rights crowds, Americans at home and Americans abroad, and good American soldiers and American soldiers who were killing, beheading, burning, and raping Vietnamese men, women, and children by the thousands.  And then one needs to take into account how the people of the 60s saw all these actions.

Today, Bill Ayers's actions would be considered terrorist, but that simple fact alone doesn't make him a terrorist just like the actions of our forefathers who married teenage girls would today make them child rapists, but that doesn't mean they actually were child rapists.

Again, I don’t let Ayers off the hook as just a vandal.  But I think we can find a more precise way to label Ayers that doesn’t lazily throw him in with Mohammed Atta and bin Laden, because whatever anyone thinks of Ayers and however criminal and dangerous his activity was, Ayers is not Atta or bin Laden.

So the question is posed to you: how do you label Bill Ayers? Terrorist? Vandal? Freedom Fighter? Traitor? Patriot?