We have this exploding prison population. We have the equivalent of martial law on a day-to-day, 24/7-hour basis in our cities, because we have not heard the cry for help by young people in 1967.

I think our concept of revolution, in terms of getting the power to do things, is too focused on the state. We have a scenario of revolution that first, you know, comes from 1917, that first you take the state power, and then you change things. And we don't realize it's collapsed.

Well, I would say that we've got to redefine democracy, that we have been stuck in concepts of representative democracy, that we believe that it's getting other people to do things for us that we progress.

When I came to Detroit, if you threw a stone up in the air it would hit an autoworker on its way down. A few years after that, if you threw a stone in the air it'd hit an abandoned house or a vacant lot on its way down. And most people saw those vacant lots as blight. But meanwhile during World War II, blacks had moved from the South to the North. And they saw these vacant lots as places where you could grow food for the community. And so urban agriculture was born.

I think that education today is a form of child abuse. The natural tendency of children is to solve problems, but we try to indoctrinate them with facts, which they are supposed to feed back, and then we fail them. And that's child abuse. And you should never raise children that way. You should cultivate and encourage their natural tendencies to create solutions to the problems around them.

I'm not calling for a boycott on voting. But I think it should be very clear that just voting is not going to solve our problems.

I think that at some level, people recognize that growing our economy is destroying us. It's destroying us as human beings, it's destroying our planet.