If you spent enough time with David Cobb, you heard him repeat himself. All great public speakers repeat themselves. He was tremendous on the stump. So likely many of you heard some of the same Cobbsian phrases roll from David’s lips.
Except which phrases you heard depended on when David was speaking them.
What David said, believed, and did changed over time.
“We learned that it’s not what corporations do that is the problem, it’s what corporations are that is the problem.”
“I’m willing to accept that there is no Tooth Fairy, but one thing I will not accept is that the United States is not a democracy.”
"The system isn't broken. It's fixed.”
“We’ve got to replace this racist, sexist, and class-oppressive system that’s plundering the Earth and getting rich from the spoils.”
“You know I love my mama.”
Ok. Some things never changed.
But others did. Sometimes these changes were a matter of emphasis. Occasionally they were more than that.
So many who knew David Cobb knew him in various ways.
Maybe they met Tigger, or the grandson of a Baptist preacher, or the trial lawyer and tough negotiator, or the actor and dramatist, or the pool hall conversationalist, or the presidential candidate, or the Harley-riding roughneck, or the close listener who charmed people and brought them together.
David and I first met in Virginia, Colorado, and New York, all in one year.
Three different meetings: The founding meeting of the Association of State Green Parties; the founding convention of the Alliance for Democracy; one of many retreats dedicated to “Rethinking the Corporation.”
This was not random coincidence. We were coming from different places, but we were on a similar path.
We found a level of intellectual and emotional comradeship that lasted 30 years.
One thing I learned about David right away was that he had questions for which he needed answers.
David Cobb was the epitome of what every good activist should be: He was what teachers call a lifelong learner.
Or to borrow a term from another “scruffy, bearded” radical, David was an underlaborer, doing the hard intellectual and emotional work of figuring things out, helping himself and other people to learn from themselves and from each other.
I saw this in so many places. We were together time and again on the streets in Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, DC, Denver, Detroit . . . I’ll skip ahead . . . New Orleans, New York, Oakland, Philly, Portland, Seattle, Tallahassee, and another four dozen cities and towns.
We were under the trees in a half dozen woodlands from the North Woods to the Texas Hill Country.
We were in meetings, hot tubs, hot springs, pool halls, union halls, convention halls, courtrooms, hearing rooms, council chambers, thrift stores (looking for suits so David would be a presentable presidential candidate), and county jails.
Like family, we were bound together, looked after each other, occasionally fought but found a way to work things out, and came back for another round of study and struggle.
As I said, David had questions. And as David often said, “These questions need answers!”
When he was a little boy, he wanted to know why his mama was angry with his daddy for putting up a sign for George Wallace in their front yard.
He learned that his Mama would not put up with racism and anti-Semitism, and he dearly loved his mama.
Soon after, he saw that he and his family were desperately poor and that other people were not. He knew instinctively that wasn’t right, but he needed to know what was behind it. He asked his teachers. They helped him. David often mentioned his teachers, among them, Judy Qualls and Ron Proctor.
When David started working construction after high school, he had friends who got hurt on the job, and he heard about workers who were killed, and he wanted to know what it would take for that to stop. And he learned more about union organizing and the labor movement.
When he got to college a few years later, he wanted to know just who these campus activists thought they were, telling him that the United States and he personally were responsible for Apartheid in South Africa. He quickly learned they knew what they were talking about, he gained an analysis of systemic racism, and he stepped across the line and became an activist.
After he graduated at the top of his law school class and worked as a well-connected trial lawyer recruited for electoral politics by the Democratic Party, he began to see corruption all around him.
He knew that wasn’t for him. He knew he had to figure out how to practice a different kind of law and a different kind of politics, independent from and able to confront the big corporations and the people who owned and ran them.
After Clinton triangulated and imposed NAFTA on the American people, David wanted to know how the corporate lobbyists won that fight. He knew the working class was divided, so he learned how to build alliances between the Steelworkers and Earth First!, which he did.
You should have seen David in the streets of Seattle in 1999, when tens of thousands of us stopped the World Trade Organization. That was the most excited and optimistic I ever saw him, which is saying a lot. In Seattle, David witnessed another world that was possible.
But David wanted to know what we needed to do to make that world happen. That question led to the next quarter century of his work building a democracy movement, a movement for constitutional change, and finally, a movement for system change.
These were just some of the questions David wrestled with, and answers he found, in his first three decades as a human being conscious of suffering in the world.
He was searching for not just a way out, but a way through, for all of us.
He was also personally searching for the right thing to do.
Somewhere in his adulthood David stopped talking as openly about honor. But I know you’ll nod your head when I tell you that honor still mattered to David.
This brings us to the hard truth that for many years, David was deeply depressed about what we are facing. And he took it personally.
There is another Cobbism I’m sure many of you have heard: “Don’t let the fascists get you down.”
He signed off many of our phone calls with that phrase:
Don’t let the fascists get you down.
The truth is, he did. He tried not to, but he took it personally.
Over the years, one of my roles in the struggles he and I had together was to convince him that there was still hope﹘that, as the Manski with the Planski (as he liked to call me) - I saw paths forward.
This was something we really fought about. Not in a mean way, but in a serious way, a sometimes frustrated way, in the way you argue about something that matters.
More recently, we stopped arguing so much about this because, while there remained space between us on how much to focus on system change and how much to build lifeboats, we read the near future in the same way.
I found it harder to give him hope. Our last communications were dark. These are very dangerous times.
Don't let the fascists get you down.
David, we still need an answer as to how we do that.
This is what all the people who knew you and loved you have been struggling with since Labor Day.
When the pessimism of our intellect makes us feel hopeless, where will we find the optimism of the will?
David: You would often say that you didn’t always do all the right thing, but at least you always tried.
Along with everything else you did right, you were right to ask questions, to need answers, to act on those answers, and to learn from experience.
You knew you could not do that alone. You were right to bring people together. Your democratic faith guided you. Your love, compassion, empathy, and courage carried you.
Solidarity, Brother Cobb. Solidarity.