The Weathermen make a quick turn, and when they seem to be free of police, tuck their helmets and jackets into shopping bags. They thin out their group by walking at differend speeds. And the Boston group has disappeared into the masses.

I run into the only Harvard student in the Boston group, who is a friend of mine. He was in Kirkland House with me. He asks what is happening. I say that, as far as we know. most of the police are north and south of here. We keep walking to avoid notice. He says that they will probably now leave this area.

I go to Madison and State where they've got three kids up against the patrol car for trying to bomb Carsons, a big department store. The police are telling everyone to keep moving over a loudspeaker system. A TV cameraman tells me to clear out soon because they're busting everyone with long hair.

The National Guard has been mobilized. They are driving up and down the streets in the back of jeeps armed with rifles. 3000 people join an illegal (no permit) RYM-H demonstration up in Old Town. 175 black high school kids climb all over the Civic Center's Picasso sculpture as the end of the march to protest police action in recent disturbances at their schools. 200 hippie? gather in Grant Park for an impromptu reaction to the Weathermen's actions. The police think these are the Weathermen and bring out 200 police to watch them.

The Weathermen have shown they will, for some reason, fight, and everyone is so confused. Six policemen are searching a carload of some very apolitical-looking freaks. They are searching for weapons.

At sunset I take the train to the movement center. One of the people from the Boston group tells me that almost everyone from their group is back and they will be leaving the state within the hour. 140 were arrested this afternoon. 290 or 90 per cent of the Weathermen are in jail. And more than half of those dragged off were bleeding. Some entire groups got ripped off. Colorado and Seattle were hit very bad.

But Boston's coming back. They took the risk and made it through. It's incredible.

I sneak up to the Tribune building at night with my duffle 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 and Glassman 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 is suicide. My existence can still live with itself, it isn't screaming for a finish. And it doesn't want to color itself a unchanging grey by landing in jail for two years. The first thing the Weathermen have going against them, the main thing. the only thing that can seem really important. is the way their actions wipes out the self. It brings them down on you. Even if they are now slowly cating 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 quo that burns the villages in Vietnam. All my happiness are probably at the expense of others' sufferings. The world is like that. And it doesn't have to be, I don't think.

Everyone dislikes the Weathermen. Their fellow New Left political groups, the professors. the average student in the street. the general public of mothers and fathers. the police men, and even the editorial page of this newspaper. of which I am an executive. They dislike the Weathermen because they can explain why the Weathermen are wrong and they think the Weathermen are stupid for not knowing it themselves.

I like the Weathermen because I hate everyone else. Everyone thinks, they know. I don't know. I can't say the Weathermen are wrong. I can act; I can make decisions, and try to keep doing only those things that seem to make sense. But I don't know. I don't think I'll ever know.

It seems that the only people who get hurt by the Weatherman actions are the Weathermen themselves. Some people's property is smashed and a few people who are policemen are hurt. But the Weathermen say that these people are the big gears in the machine that's wiping people out all over the world. This statement sounds like it might be somewhat true. Just how true it is and how much "moral responsibility" people "owe" other people for the way they both live I don't know. I'm not even sure that "moral responsibility" exists. All feelings of morality that I have are not real things: they are just the values that my growing up existence has worked into me.

One first feels his morality and then adopts a rationale for it later. My morality can have a great deal of sympathy with the Weatherman slogan. "Bring the War Home." In other words. if they are going to perpetrate the war. let them experience their own work. Of course, morality is much more intricate than that. But that is just the point. The morality is infinitely complex: Nixon is not responsible for the war in Vietnam, No one in particular is. So the Weathermen are attacking that no one.

I have a great natural sympathy for crazy. anarchistic action. Preferably action that offers no further risk of guilt. I would like to blow up big stone banks, up over the Washington Monument. I used to sit every morning when I was 14 years old in a big gothic chapel dreaming of machine gunning the headmaster and deacons when they walked out the front door.

I also like disorder. chaos, riot, and entropy. The people who say they know don't know. I love to see them at a loss for words while I hug the unknown.