One of my favorite stories about local politics goes back to the late 1970s, when Abbie Hoffman was living under an assumed name in a small town on the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York. The way Abbie tells it, he read in the newspaper one day that the Army Corps of Engineers had plans to blast a new shipping channel right through the section of the river that ran by his home. The project would involve dynamiting several small islands and opening an environmentally sensitive stretch of waterway to major shipping.
Hoffman decided to risk blowing his cover and start fighting the plan. For weeks, he went around and knocked on his neighbors’
