The Weathermen're Shot, They're Bleeding, They're Running, They're Wiping Stuff Out

Following are excerpts from "The Weathermen're Shot. They're Bleeding. They're Running, They're Wiping Stuff Out," by John G. Short '70. The article, which appeared in The Crimson Nov. 12, 1969, won the Dana Reed Prize in 1970 for the best example of undergraduate writing that year. Short died Monday of cancer at the age of 35.

Walking over to Lincoln Park Wednesday night. I stop at a liquor store, buy a bottle of beer, and ask for an opener. I know what the Weather Bureau has got planned for tonight. Earlier, at the briefing at the Michigan Washington-New-England-and-New-York-State movement headquarters, they told us that that after the speeches we were going to march through the city. The police would try to stop us. Police make me very uneasy. The beer fails to make me the least bit high.

At Lincoln Park the turnout for this, the first demonstration, is very small. About 300 people are gathered around a bonfire fueled by park benches. Another 200 newspapermen and spectators stand around the edges. It is very sad. They had announced 1500 would show, and were really expecting 800. It is undeniably terrible when any left political movement turns out to have far less support than it needs, when the people you thought you had won don't care to show.

I sit down on the grass at the edge of the crowd not listening to the speakers, watching the fire glowing through the legs of the people around it looking through the trees across the park to the cars going by on the express way. I count the cars, and my friend, Kunen, keeps time. In 150 seconds, two and a half minutes, as many people whiz by on the expressway as there are Weathermen in the world.

How sad that only this few people are crazy. Where are the massed armies of insanity? A hundred thousand people marched on the Pentagon. Maybe it's because that was on a weekend and this is the middle of the week.

Quite suddenly a speaker is announcing. "We're going to be moving out now. Stay with your groups; and follow the leadership." The march wants to get as far south as the Drake Hotel, which is next door to where the judge of the Conspiracy 8 trial lives. There are no police in the park: they are all in the streets outside waiting to move in if the Weathermen stay past the eleven o'clock curfew.

The Weathermen break into a run across the park on signal. They are wearing white helmets, which are all you can see bobbing up and down in the night. They are screaming and chanting, and suddenly start the high-pitched shrill used by the people of Algiers during the revolution. Ill-leel-leel-lil-ill-il-eel-eeeeeeeeeeee.

They pass a big square park building. Stones and bricks are hurled up out of the running crowd and smash to pieces the building's 20-foot-tall plate glass windows.

Now they are across the last bit of park and running into the street. There are no police around anywhere. The police have somehow been faked out. The crowd charges up Clark Street, one of the main streets of Chicago, wiping out store windows on both sides. And then a florist shop takes a stone right through its front window. Lots of flowers are knocked over.

This is when I decide to put a distinction between me and the Weathermen. Their action is really against the people. Kunen is running up the street alongside me. He says, "What are they doing hitting a florist shop?" I don't know, but I don't feel as bad about it as he does. We move out of the crowd and start running up the sidewalk.

A bottle thrown out of the crowd hits the side of a building just in front for me. A girl with long blonde hair is showered with glass but isn't cut. A boy from the crowd yell at us." Get into the street" But it looks like everyone in the street is going to be shot and arrested pretty soon. The sirens are beginning to scream.

The crowd slows down to a fast walk every so often to allow itself to be amazed. They have taken control of the street. They have proceeded entirely unchecked by opposition. The police squad cars pull across each new intersection only to drive screeching away when the crowd gets near.

Their sound is echoing off the tall buildings around them. Their boots are thumping like a forced march. A new window goes shattering to the ground every two seconds. They begin wiping out cars.

The brighter lights of the Loop are far up Clark Street. But the crowd swings into a turn left onto Goethe Street. The kids are all staying very close together. When it turns, the crowd seems to act as one, its arms waving, its helmets bobbing, flowing into the smaller street like a river rushing through a canyon.

They hit State Street and head back down toward the Loop again. They have foxed the police. It is very hard to keep track of the crowd in the night.

Some of the girls don't have helmets on. Their hair is streaming back behind their heads as they run. They all pass some construction sites where people run over to pick new stones and bricks. No paving stones in Chicago. A guy is going past a Rolls Royce. He plants one foot ahead of him. Stops, pivots like a shortstop bringing his arm down in a big arch. His club takes out the windshield. Someone else opens the back door, rips out the phone or something, and leaves. Middle-aged people looking out from the lobby of the hotel and standing in furs on the street are visibly upset.

Now the police are zooming in to take a stand at Division Street. The crowd charges forward to get there first before the police can set up. But the police are ready, and they move in on the running crowd as it enters the intersection. Tear gas is fired.

The Weathermen have been divided. Some made it through and they are now circling back north to join the rest of the group...

I leave to find where the Weathermen have gone. It isn't easy. Their line of march is only about half a block long, and they move so fast that by the time you find them they're either on top of you or gone again.

I find them going north on Astor Street back up toward Lincoln Park. They seem to have been travelling in S-type patterns, constantly changing their direction to avoid the police...

Buckshot zings into the trees over the heads of the kids.

Two or three policemen step out front and level their pistols at the crowd. Blam, blam, blam, blam, blam. They empty their guns at the kids. Several people go down. But they are not lift; they're ducking. It takes about half a minute for the Weathermen to realize that those were blanks. But by then they are retreating. They have no guns.

A girl is lying in the intersection. She has been shot through the leg with a real pistol bullet. A boy has been shot in his shoulder and the side of his body. The police have a lot of people they grabbed pinned up against patrol cars.

Police come charging down their middle in a V. The group is split, running up two different streets. Several more shots are fired. I am toward the back of the group when two cars of plainclothes policemen come roaring up from behind. They leap out of their cars before they have even stopped and start grabbing people.

There is an alley to my right. It is the only way out. Half a dozen of us take off down the alley as fast as we can with the cops chasing us. Police come pouring into the area behind us. I am running.

I spin my head and my glasses go flying off. I think. "There go my glasses." I can't see, but I don't even slow down. The police are a few steps behind us. Some of the girls, who aren't as fast, are getting caught.

The alley becomes dark, and all I see is the light at the end of it down on North Avenue. As I run, I am dreaming. There is something I can remember, somewhere where this whole piece of terror happened to me before. I remember, yes, it happened, running away from two boys who tried to hold me up with a razor blade one night in Harlem. I'm not aware of my legs lifting or my arms pumping or any part of running. I can't see. I am floating through a blur.

As I'm coming to the end of the alley all I can see is the flashing blue lights of police cars in front of me. All I can hear is the high tweet of police whistles being blown all around me. The police are coming at us from the other end of the alley, too.

Then, as we approach them, there comes an empty lot, on our left. There is a wire fence as high as my chest. I and one or two other kids, put our hands on it, and throw ourselves over.

Now I am running across the lot, stepping on things I can't see, surrounded again by police whistles and flashing blue lights moving parallel to us in the street.

I get to the other side and take a flying leap over the same fence. A police car turns down the stret right in front of me. I put one hand on the trunk and twist around it, taking off down North Avenue, right next to the park, again.

The police are moving back in the other direction now to seal off the area I just got out of. They are all behind me. They can't leave their posts.

I stop running in a couple of blocks, and quickly take off my black leather jacket and wipe the sweat off my face and make like a pedestrian. I can't see anything and stop some people on the street to ask what street I'm on and which way to the nearest telephone. They point west.

I find a gas station, its phone, and a dime. It's an open phone, right out on the street. I dial the long-distance operator and call. The Crimson to file my news. I get David Hollander in the newsroom. "David." I say, "everything's gone wild here...

Morning comes at 6:30 when the lights are turned on again, this time for good. People get up from where they've been sleeping, and collapse on the floor in a rough circle around the leadership. I pull on my pants and shiver, leaning against the wall with my blankets wrapped around my legs.

Girls make up much of the leadership in our center. And one of them is giving us an initial analysis of the last night's events. She wants is point out what went wrong, but tells us there were a of good things about it, too.

"There was a lot of smashing windows and hitting rich people's property and doing a lot of out-a-sight stuff. But, "she says," a lot of people got ripped off, too. And that wasn't good."

People make the criticism that we should have fought the police more. They say that people would fight back when they were attacked, but that often groups would change their direction to avoid only four or five policemen when we could have overwhelmed them instead...

We talk about whether wiping out all the parked cars is an action against the people. It is generally understood that the area we attached is where the oppresning class lives and that people who associate with this existence are putting their cars on the line by their truth by their town net of will. It is then, more or less these people's fault if their car is there. The Weathermen believe after all that there can be no spectators in the revolution--you're either part of it, or you are automatically acting against it. I am thinking that they are probably right, but, at the same time, they are demanding an awful lot, in fact too much, or people. Someone suggests that we spare Volkswagens and that sort of thing. The idea is passively accepted by the group spread around on the floor...

...[The next night, after a few more demonstrations have taken place]. At midnight I go back to our movement center where they are holding a secret meeting of all the 250 or so Weathermen in Chicago to discuss what has already happened and to plan their strategy until Saturday. The entire Weather Bureau is there...

Mark Rudd talks, and then someone with red hair in a T-shirt begins a long rap about Weathermen political philosophy. I'm leaning against a post, summarizing, for my own use. Weathermen philosophy as follows:

1) Our economic structure in this country (capitalism, my father's corporations, your father's corporations) perpetuates a system. Our related social habits (thinking we are separate people, out on our own, not responsible to the poor around us), perpetuates the system. The system, whether or not it means to, keeps down the poor and the people in foreign countries where we have imperial interests.

2) Our jaillike schools make us unhappy, with the result that we become oppressors defending the system to cover up our unhappiness. Family-inspired social conventions teach us subconsciously to do absurd things like giving an inferior role to women. And the values of our competitive capitalist economy teach us to squish anyone who's weaker than us.

3) Since the system makes us oppressors, no halfway effort to change the system, which cooperates with some of the values of that system, could ever win.

4) Only the kids and the Blacks will join the struggle because they're the only ones whose lives aren't already tied up in the values of the system. The white workers won't join because they're got white-skin privilege.

5) There is a worldwide people's revolution going on right now. National boundaries don't cut us off from this because when the revolution is over, there will be only one people's government.

6) The first actions of this white revolutionary youth movement in the U.S. must be of a symbolic nature because its numbers are now small. They must show that the human spirit is capable of actual fighting even in spite of the peacefulness and obedience we were taught in school.

7) Finally, if people are shown that fighting can be and is, done, then more kids will join in.

This is to close how the Weathermen in the street looks at things. I like it because it gets at the complexity of the world's guilt.

[Two days later] The Weathermen are going to get it. This area is being floated by even more sirens. They won't be able to get out. It is daylight...

...I sneak up to the Tribune building at night with my duffel bag. It is very dangerous to be a long-haired kid from out of state on the streets. They are still arresting people. I meet Parker [Donham '67('69) of The Boston Globe] and James Glassman ['69 of the Herald Traveler] in the Times office. Glassman gives me his suit coat so we won't get stopped. Parker drives us to the airport. And we take off out of there.

We are flying over lit Chicago, and I can see all the streets at once.

I am ambivalent. What the Weathermen were doing was suicide. My existence can still live with itself it isn't screaming for a finish. And it doesn't want to color itself an unchanging gray by landing in jail for two years. The first thing the Weathermen have going against them, the made thing, the after thing, the only thing that can seem really important, is the way their actions wipe out the self. It Springs them down on you. Even if they are now slowly dating you away by the way they make you live, that seems better than being destroyed suddenly and totally.

Maybe to be a Weatherman you have to feel like nothing, to feel so crushed and fitted into the system that the only thing you want to do is break off and go smashing through the machinery with the hope that the other gears will come smashing with you. We are all guilty of racism and genocide. Just by living in the U. S. we are helping to maintain the status one that thirty the addresses in Vicmain. All my happinesses are probably at the depense of other's sufferings. The work is like that was it doesn't have to be I don't think.