We need to learn how to organize, not just to let our anger explode. We need to have organization for the long run, not for one issue, not for one murder, but for everything coming to us in the next 20, 30 years.
Paul Ryan's love of Rage Against the Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades.
Good scientists will fight the system rather than learn to work with the system.
That force - which the system tried to laugh at - when it finally broke through and the movement was recognized, the media said they were "just a bunch of spoiled kids, dope smokers [who] don't know what the hell they want." To demean it as something laughable - but that didn't work for very long. It's still an ongoing struggle; they're trying to find out how to fight. It's very exciting times.
The White House, in advancing the agenda for a [school] "choice" plan, rests its faith on market mechanisms. What reason have the black and very poor to lend their credence to a market system that has proved so obdurate and so resistant to their pleas at every turn?
It's a tiny revolution to express yourself fully and be who you want to be, especially when systems tell you that you can't. I've realized how powerful it is for me to just discuss issues with young people and begin conversations.
If voting could change anything, they would have made it illegal.
What I have found is that even when you try to transform existing structures they are so powerful they often overwhelm, seduce, and control you.
Any time there is a cultural breakthrough in which this culture transcends what it's supposed to be, there's a violent reaction. So we had a black president, and it's followed by an incredibly violent reaction. It happens over and over.
I was still interested in the youth rebellion but never-the-less I stopped being a victim. Stopped trying to attack the establishment realizing that it takes too much of your energy.
Any initiative which patently served the interests of society was immediately viewed with suspicion and even with overt hostility. Why was our system so unresponsive to renewal and innovation?
