I came from a very comfortable, middle-class family living in Highland Park, Illinois.Really growing up in a Jewish community with a fabulous public school.

The most recent science including from Jim Hansen, the foremost climate scientist, suggests that we could see as much as, according to his study, meters' worth [of sea-level rise] - that is nine, 12, 15 and more - as soon as 50 years from his study.

I was previously involved in local and state politics, but not national, because grassroots democracy starts at the bottom. This was the breaking point for me, though - and it made the case that in order to fight locally, we have to fight nationally; we can't afford to neglect any area of life in this democracy.

I mean, I really loved the mix of personal health and, kind of, community health and justice, and I really saw how they were inseparable.

In the words of Frederick Douglas, power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will. We must be that demand. We are the ones we've been waiting for.

You know, my sense is that transparency is a good thing. It also has to be what - private information should be safeguarded so that individuals are not caught in the cross-fire here. But I think that our government, and people who are working in our government who should have been on the record - Hillary Clinton, remember, deleted half of her email, which is like, what's wrong with this picture?

There's one other element I just want to be sure to mention here: that is that there are 43 million young people who are locked into predatory student loan debt for whom there is no way out in the foreseeable future given the economy that we have: this predatory Wall Street driven financialized low-wage service industry economy.