"They strike. We strike back."

Three of the city reporters broke in, shouting:

"Give us names. We can't give any of this as fact unless you can give us names. identification. Where were they shot? How many?"

Nina Davis was hard as nails, a perfect match for most of the city reporters. Elizabeth Gardner was biting her lip and looking at the floor. She let her half-smoked cigarette flop in an ashtray and held her stomach, unnoticed.

"What is happening in Chicago is much heavier than the past on the white movement. But it's always been much heavier on the Panthers. 21 Panthers have been killed by the pigs. Bobby Hutton . . .

"What we, the Weathermen, are trying to do here should be clear. We are beginning a war of the white young people against the United States of America . . . for the repressed peoples of the world.

"Let me tell you people. the white people of this country have been living off the fruits of the labors of the black, brown, yellow oppressed lives of the world. But these oppressed people have risen up-in Peru, Venezuela, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, throughout the Third World, in the Black colonies, and now at home. In a world-wide revolution of peoples that have proven to be a majority in the world, although they happen to be a minority in this country. The majority is proving that technology can be beaten.

"We're fighting in support of a majority of the world's peoples.

"We cannot continue living from the fruits of their labors, we have given it all up to fight."

The newspapermen weren't listening. Mike Royko, a columnist for the Chicago Daily News. had the Weathermen pegged as aristocratic dilettantes. "They spoke a combination of Negro slang, greaser jargon, and Marxist slogans, which is a bit hard to do if you have a Ph.D. in Anthropology and your father is a stockbroker."

SDS continued, "The Chicago cops said before everything started that this was a war-kill or be killed."

"And like the Vietnamese, we are determined to fight. We are determined to win."

The newsmen wanted to accept the Weathermen at their word. They were waiting for the Weathermen to start shooting police from the rooftops, to blow up railroads, buildings . . . not something so symbolic as a statue of a policeman in Haymarket Square. Why didn't the Weathermen play their parts in ways that could be counted. measured; or assessed.?

To cover the end of the world would be the newsman's Nirvana. And he would be functioning at the peak of his enthusiasm right up to the very end-because the most important happening that would ever occur would be happening for him. If the promised 15.000 had showed up . . .

But the Weathermen had severely limited their choice of weapons. Their actions seemed curiously gentle compared to the logic and imagination of the press. To a rational world they were defenseless in more ways than one. Guns were not in their arsenal and neither could they muster a sense of humor.