Show Notes
Howdy y’all, It’s taken me a while to get around to sending out parts of the Celebration of life we had at the Arcata Playhouse. It’s a long service. We had music and wonderful speakers, so I thought I would share the individual segments with you. If you’d like to see the whole thing, you can find it here. Our first speaker was Jim Reed. Jim initially met David in a Green Party meeting in 1999, with the following four years closely organizing together on political and social issues, which laid the initial foundation for their lifelong bond and endearing friendship. David called Jim, “Brotherman.” And they were truly soul brothers
Transcript: Howdy, y’all. It is an honor to be a part of this, for sure. I want to start off by saying I don’t want to offend any of the nice folks here tonight, and I truly have enjoyed meeting so many of you from different chapters of David’s life. But honestly, there’s a part of me that hasn’t really been looking forward to this day, and Even though this incredibly beautiful ceremony of life is also the symbol of our good friend transitioning from the physical form. So if I start to cry, don’t take it personal, it’s not you, it’s me. There’s a common expression, greatly overused. You don’t know how much you love something until it’s gone. And that silly expression does not apply in this case. I have known how much I’ve loved David Keith Cobb from the minute I met the man. Like a lot of us, it started with an overwhelming sense of awe. His authentic and intense energy, his booming voice, and of course that incredibly handsome smile. When I first met David, it was 1999, and I did not... Completely understand the impact that man was going to have on my life. I was a young man turning 27 at the time, which as a male human is still adolescent years. And like many of us, I met him at a political meeting, a Texas Green Party meeting. And I knew just from the way he introduced himself and what he included while he was in that meeting, that he had captured something that I had been feeling Yet I had not been able to articulate myself. Writing, social injustice, and building a true democracy which we were promised in our youth. And he gave me something I had never had. He gave me a direction and he gave me hope. It lit a fire under my ass. I quit my engineering job for many years, several years, four years, and worked closely with David and with him by my side Let’s be honest. With him leading a fearless charge and me trying to keep up, I was willing to take on the whole system. I learned so much about him during those years, about people and organizing. And I learned a lot of history that they did not teach us in school. But the most important thing I learned was how an incredibly beautiful person he was. He could charm the pants off a five-year-old in an ice cream parlor or an old lady picking groceries at a store. He could walk into any room and have the ability to make everyone feel comfortable and at ease, even in the wake of his large presence, which he didn’t know any other way to be. In community meetings, he was very good about sharing space and harvesting ideas from the collective community. He was very good about avoiding stereotypes associated with age, education, religion, race, gender, orientation, et cetera. It was almost like a long time ago he saw through all that bullshit, realizing that this was just a distraction, part of the matrix that the established had set up for us for better mind control. And what do you see when you shed all those false identities? You see people’s hearts. And I would say that most hearts are good, you know? A scared heart can do dangerous things. But I rarely have met a bad heart, right? I think hearts are good. And that is actually his true superpower. You know, his true superpower was that connection of heart to heart, you know? David was also an intense intellectual. And sadly, not once in 28 years of being close friends was I ever able to share a new book or
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