Goodbye Lenny Weinglass

Noting the death of Leonard Weinglass, an attorney, evokes for me the Chicago 7 and Abie Hoffmann, Daniel Ellsberg, The Weather Underground, the Yippies and the Hippies, disputatious groups and people who made a "movement" and made a generation. The radicals of the 1960's who needed to be defended in court against charges legitimate and trumped up, found in Weinglass, a champion who fought ably for them, the rowdy and indiscrete, the drug-adled and the unwashed, the long-haired freaks who spit on society's frumpiness and discriminatory traditions.

There is a kind of wistfulness in all these memories, for me, because in those far distant days, things "happened" for principles with which I often agreed, and the names and places come back with a force that makes me regretful of the contorted times and circumstances we now live in.