AN INTERVIEW WITH ABBIE HOFFMAN I first met Abbie at URI campus. He was not stoned. Surprising thinking he'd just finished plugging his new book, "Steal This Urine Test". He was lecturing about the upcoming Student Convention at Rutgers this February. The crowd was -- I dunno, about 600 people. They expected over a thousand, but no one showed up cause it was a Thursday nite and you know how that goes at college. The kegs start about 4pm thursday and go til sunday morning around 1am. Anyways, those who gave up the keggin for a day got to see quite the riot. He was cussin and rantin and ravin about how much Raygun Reagan's gonna fuck things up on his way out. You know, make a parking lot out of Iran, spend all our money, fuck fawn hall, etc, etc. I asked him if the newspapers had the right to say we're at war right now, and he said, "if you call 10,000 guatemalan Indians dying every month by american bullets a war, go for it." Abbie's tryin to get a bunch of us college aged people down to Rutgers University this february and we're all gonna lock ourselves in this building for three days and rewrite the U.S. constitution. Then we're gonna get this highschool girl to stand up in the Middle of the presidential debates next year and demand that if the US doesnt vote on the new Constitution before we vote for a new president, 40,000 fuckin teenagers are gonna blow up every large city in the US in the next three weeks. Well, ok, not that harsh, but they're gonna stand up and take notice when a bunch of "heads" have the brains to all of a sudden do something just as politically radical; get involved!!! So, anyways, Abbie takes me and a couple kids to this bar in Wakefield and gets us cocked. Then we ask him questions and he ignores us and watches the Chicago Bears get the shit kicked out of them on a 19inch tv. After the game we talk politics again. We ask him who he's following for the 88 election, and he tells us "who the fuck cares." "Politics is every day, man," Abbie says. "Not just who's gonna win in four years, or who should be town counselor. Politics is your roomates, your friends, your stupid teachers that have no clue." "Well how the hell do we get the rest of America involved." "It's not a thing of the rest of em. The average person in amerika could give a shit about this. They're busy working at the shipbuilding plant, coming home and watching Three's Company, beating their wife, and kicking their dog. Abbie's a radical fuckin dude, that's all I have to say. He's the first person I've met who isn't afraid to tell a cop he's a pig right to his face. You know, the only person alive with the balls to walk into the Philadelphia Utilities company and say, "you charge too much fuckin money. Rip up the wiring to my house, I'm buildin a fuckin windmill." HE DID. the end, julie. all right? OK, I was at a Dunkin Donuts and I wrote that part right from my head. Here's some exact quotes from my notes which I didnt have with me at the time. HOW CAN OUR YOUTH GET SOME IMMEDIATE RESULTS IN AN AMERICA WHERE KIDS ARE APATHETIC? THEY THINK THERE'S NOTHING THEY CAN DO IN THE POLITICAL PROCESS. Rutgers. Rutgers is where you have to go. Right now there are about 3,000 students around calling themselves activists. I know, because I see more activists than anybody in the country. My own kids are activists, I see them all the time. BUT WHAT ABOUT SOMEONE WHO WANTS TO GET MORE INVOLVED THAN FOR ONE EVENT; ONCE A YEAR SAY, OR EVERY 4 YEARS. Politics is not something you go to the booth and pull the party lever for. It's something you do every day. HOW CAN A BUDDING JOURNALIST HELP THE YOUTH SEE THAT. Listen, you've gotta get people thinking that politics is a way of life. The way they act all the time. Then you've gotta get em thinkin, "forget about the president; let's talk about the city council... HOW DO YOU GET THE GENERAL PUBLIC MORE AWARE. The general public is not involved. The General Public doesnt make change. First thing you do is knock out of your vocabulary and mind, the idea of nobody and everybody. Because you're not taking gallup polls all the time. You're talking to your roomate, your friends. For social change, you need < enough people> that's all. HOW DO I PREPARE FOR RUTGERS The philadelphia electric company is upset with me because I'm not just blowin windmills. They know I'm one fuck of an organizer. And I'm willing to risk everything. That's the mentality you gotta develop. Not who you gonna vote for. You've gotta say, how do we get block booking now or how do we get the cars together, what points are we gonna raise, are we just gonna go there to bullshit to argue that local organizing's more important or we need a black woman lesbian leader the first time who's against a vegitarian cabbage kid supporting arms struggle; is that what you're gonna do? Stay home!!! If you're gonna go to really wrestle with the problems of decision making, of leadership, with some idea of politics and how it works, a give and take, a compromise, then you go to Rutgers and build the organization. You will change how the world looks at young people in America. And you'll change history. DO YOU THINK THE PRESS SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO SAY WE'RE AT WAR RIGHT NOW? Think about 1 million Indians in Guatemala killed or driven out of their homes; are we at war? DO YOU THINK CENSORSHIP IS OK. I do think at times of war, the reality overcomes some of your ideals; but write away. p a p / / / . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . / / / d e d Downloaded from P-80 Systems......