If we talk about literacy, we have to talk about how to enhance our children's mastery over the tools needed to live intelligent, creative, and involved lives.

Leadership has to be focused on some very radical ideas that only we as 21st Century people can talk about: making sure people have a livelihood, making sure people receive a living wage, making sure the environment, the Mother Earth, is embraced and cherished and not destroyed. Making sure people are healthy in what they eat, making sure we hold people and corporations accountable for the damage they do not only to our environment but to our institutions.

When someone you know passes on, the only thing you can do is keep moving forward.

I try to find hope in struggle and resistance in small places as much as I can.

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.

I remember when Langston Hughes used to write a column in black newspapers around this character Jesse B. Semple. He always used that as a voice, sometimes in comic ways, of having everyday people's voice come through this common folk hero, who was an ordinary working guy. He would talk about anything from police brutality to the Korean War. Those kinds of expression and identification are no longer prevalent in our popular culture.

It's also important for those who promote those issues within the white community - the somewhat privileged community - to talk about issues affecting people of color.