[O]ur greatest contributions to the cause of freedom and development overseas is not what we do over there, but what we do right here at home.

Freedom is not the capacity to do whatever we please; freedom is the capacity to make intelligent choices.

We got hooked on grain-fed meat just as we got hooked on gas guzzling automobiles. Big cars made sense only when oil was cheap; grain-fed meat makes sense only because the true costs of producing it are not counted.

Each of us carries within us a worldview, a set of assumptions about how the world works - what some call a paradigm - that forms the very questions we allow ourselves to ask, and determines our view of future possibilities.

Diane Wilson asked, "Why aren't people upset? Why aren't people protesting?" The mayor and county commissioners told her to keep quiet, and everybody else was afraid to speak out against the companies, which included some of the country's biggest chemical companies. There were even attempts on her life. Family members abandoned her, and certainly none of the other shrimpers stood with her.

That's what happened when my own life crumbled. The people who came into my life bolstered me to take more risks, to be even more true to myself.

History doesn't proceed in incremental little notches.