Yesterday I stopped to chat with Thomas, as I have done before. He is not a fanatic with burning eye and stabbing finger, a fevered Savonarola of Lafayette Park. Talking with him in the sunshine, I thought of the Hebrew prophets, the medieval monks - all people of uncompromising conviction, unqualified consistency. He was a businessman, but day had a kind of vision. And time is money.
Love of money is the root of all evil.
He takes literally that biblical saying. He decided to live without money, went to one of the poorest parts of the world, walked, penniless, from Casablanca to Morocco to Cairo, not begging, eating what people gave him or what he found. One day, he concluded that states oppress people, Including his own country, the United States of America, so he threw his pass into the Thames in London and chose to a stateless person. But the world of states resisted. He spent a year in an Egyptian prison, was seized by the Israelis and expelled from the country.