It's very irresponsible as a parent to follow Tipper Gore or the Religious Right's advice and just take the offending CD or game away from the kid without discussing it.

I got turned on to rock music almost by mistake when I was seven years old.

I was born in the late '50s, was a child of the '60s, then the '70s, then the '80s, then the '90s, and I have mental fingers in all those pies.

We need a new law that owners of SUVs (Sport Utility Vehicles) are automatically in the military reserve. Then they can go get their own goddamn oil.

In San Francisco, most of the older activists, especially at Berkeley, were very hostile towards punks. The music, certainly, wasn't nice and mellow for them, and neither was our look or our attitude. While in Vancouver, the two most important early punk bands, D.O.A. and the Subhumans, were both managed by former yippie activists, who saw this as a logical extension of what they were already doing.

What they're not doing is marketing the Dead Kennedys in the spirit of what the band stood for.

Another part of what gave me a questioning, rabble-rousing, activist heart and soul is that when all these heavy events went down, my parents did not shelter the kids from it.