Dinner with a Radical

I'm busy. Really busy, morning to night. Everything is suffering, especially me. Last night, though, I had dinner with co-founder of the Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale. Dinner with a radical, if you will. Bobby is now seventy-three and the revolution was fifty years ago. No matter. Everything he said then is still apropos. And he can still fire you up to get you on the street. You can tell he gets a kick out of things.

I met Abbie Hoffman years ago. My band opened for him. Sounds silly, right? It was. He was speaking at the local country club college and because we were political radicals being watched by the local authorities, organizers asked us to play before he spoke. Abbie was just back from hiding in Peru. He'd had a nose job and some other surgery to help him avoid "the laws" as they used to say, and he didn't look like the fellow on all the posters. He'd apparently picked up quite a habit in Peru, too, for he was twitchy the whole time, rolling the sleeves of his shirt up higher and higher, chewing his lip and rubbing his nose. The old marching powder had him jumping.

I told this to Bobby, and he sort of laughed and told some funny Hoffman stories. Old buddies, he said. He talked about all the speaking engagements they all had after the Chicago trial, of the international attention he got after Judge Julius Hoffman had him bound and gagged in the courtroom. Someone at dinner asked him why. He said because he wouldn't shut up. He kept screaming at the judge, he said, laughing. He was proud that for all his arrests, he was rarely convicted. He paid attention to the law and used it. He'll convince you that it was the other side who were the violators. And it is easy to believe him, too.

Bobby talked a lot about money. I realized something about those early organizers that in some sort of naivete, I'd not thought of much before. I'll write about it later, perhaps, but economics wasn't just an abstraction for most of them. Money is money.

But I haven't time today. Duty calls. My life may settle down enough to give me leisure to think and write, but for now it is all go go go go go. There are unions to organize and principles to pursue and many other things besides.