the communiques they released were professional, reflecting their education: they'd produce an executive summary, bulleted, following by maybe 17 pages of detailed explanation of why a corporate site was being bombed for u.s. gov activites in chile.
later, there was an intense spate of marxist study that eventually lead to the publication of the book Prairie Fire which required that they set up their own printing operation and create transportation and distribution channels which they did in concert with aboveground allies, Prairie Fire OC (I don't have the book beside me to recall precisely what OC stood for -- organzing comm? maybe?)
another thing that's missed by all the bile is that they were supported above ground. they'd never have gotten buy without a network of supporters who raised money for them and so forth. This network grew as the organization realized they'd made mistakes, regretting their arogance, and they mended these old wounds. Support grew throughout the 70s.
another thing the bile tends to obscure is the violence that went on constantly before and after weather -- which had zip to do with weather. I couldn't believe all the bombings that had happened before weather emerged out of the SDS convention.
anyway, more later.
At 11:58 PM 5/11/2009, Carrol Cox wrote:
>shag carpet bomb wrote:
> >
> > the second essay actually contains some substance. but i'm not clear,
> > from either you or carrol, how weather hurt anyone.
>
>Well, there was the UofI student from Arlington Heights, a utterly
>committed Weatherman. Likeable. At the August 69 regional conference he
>described one of my statements as the most stupid thing he'd ever heard
>(or something like that). But he was trapped in the Weatherman vice:
>Imperailaism had to be destroyed, and the u.s. working class was
>hopeless. As the first enthusiasm of Weather faided, he hanged himself.
>There was this young woman at ISU who I first met taking notes at a
>meeting of the Bloomington Human Rights Commission. (Dressed in a suit
>and heels yet. Her father owned a paint store in Bloomington. A really
>smart and likeable young woman. I recruited ther in the fall of '68 to
>the SDS temporary front, the Peace & Freedom Party. (It wasn't a secret,
>but even for thse who knew that P&F was 'really' SDS the name made a
>difference.) In January she joined SDS and threw herself into
>organizing. In February she and I were at the house of a physics teacher
>from U.H., and I remember her sitting on the floor and beginning to muse
>and in about 30 minutes, George and I saying practically nothing, she
>decided that it had to be socialism. In March there was a interim SDS
>confernce in Austen, Texas. I subsidized her going. She rode down with a
>car full of Weathermen from Chicago. She came back a convinced
>Weatherman. She got her arm broken in the Days of Rage. She dropped out
>of school, and joined a collective somewhere, I think Cleveland. The
>last time I saw her, about a year or two later, she was passing through
>town (having dropped out of politics) going more or less from nwhere to
>nowhere, and she was consulting an astrology magazine to determine her
>bus schedule.
>
>Another student and his wife; both wonderul people. He wanted to go to
>medical school. Both dropped out of school. I think he ultimately got a
>degree and is teaching someplace, but I haven't seen him in hears and
>don't know. Another young student the last I knew was living in a
>manufacture teepee of some sort in the New Mexico desert. That was
>actually a pretty good ending for him, considering. The last time Jan &
>I saw him was when we drove him home to Macomb after he had (after
>taking lsd) crashed through the plate glass window of a hamburger place
>to join all the happy people he saw hinside. The leaders (Dohrn, Jones,
>etc.) came out fine. The rank and file (such as it was, for never have
>so few done so little and gained so much attention) - well, it just
>wrung the life out of many of them.
>
>And the Weathermen at work - some of which almost got me, Jan, & several
>others almost beaten by a mob of very angry high-school students. It was
>in connection with the October action. Rym2 had its own, separate from
>Weather's Days of Rage but at the same time. Several of us from B/N went
>with a Chicago SDS woman (she was Chinese, which may be why she took the
>hardest blows in wht followeed.) We went to leaflet this high school in
>North Chicago for the march coming up. I parked up a one-way street from
>the high school, and we prepared to leaflet at this candy store across
>the street from the school. A student saw SDS on the leaflet, and all of
>a suddent it seemed like there were a thousand bearing down on us. We
>ran toward the car, I got there, and drove back picking up others as we
>went along. Not too much damage to the car. Jan says I took a hard blow
>on the back as we were running but I didn't even know it. The cause.
>Weather people had been playing there little game at that high schools:
>Are you four or against imperialism? You have 60 seconds to decisede.
>Then we'll beat you up. And they had beaten a couple kids. We took the
>the brunt of it a few days later. Great agitational technique.
>
>Carrol
>
>___________________________________
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