I was a good liberal in some sense at that point. I wanted to end a war. I wanted to support the civil rights movement.

It felt to me like I was living my life in a way that didn't make mockery of my values. That's what I intended to do. So, that became a very radicalizing proposition for me.

Living in a bubble as I said in a featherbed of privilege. That's why leaving home, leaving the prep school and going to the University of Michigan in the early '60s was a moment of awakening and to go to a place like Michigan and to see suddenly a world in flames and the injustices all around was quite a wake up call. I lasted a year and a half at Michigan before I dropped out and joined the merchant marines and I was a merchant marine for my sophomore year then I came back to Michigan.

We all want to believe this American pastoral, but there's more to it. We have to be willing to exile ourselves from the fantasies and the mythology that we create around ourselves, or we're doomed to kind of innocently blunder into every country in the world and murder people.

Chicago '68 was a relatively small demonstration for its time, but I've talked to millions of people who claim they were there because it felt like we were all there. Everyone from our generation was there and was at Woodstock.

If the logic of capitalism is "expand or die," then either it has to die or the world has to die.

Part of the fun of writing, touring, teaching, is engaging with real people about all of it: what to do now, how to build a movement, of approaches to teaching, of parenting - it's exciting to be in that dialogue.