I truly do live my life a day at a time. When I talk to people trying to get through anything, it's a day at a time. If people stop to think, "It's going to be potentially three years and 10 months for the new president to come in," that's a very long time and that can have major effects on somebody's psyche. But if you take this thing a day at a time, and break it down a little differently, and do what you can do today, it will make it easier for people to move forward, and it makes it easier for me to move forward.

The millennial that lives in a very red state might not even realize that their congressman thinks that they have no constituents that feel the opposite of what the president or they are doing. This is the time to step up and push back.

The majority of people who come to America come for a better life, just like the Italians, the Jews, the Irish, and the Polish did in generations before. A lot of the Irish came here back in the turn of the 19th to the 20th century because there were no opportunities and no options at home for them. There were no jobs and there was extreme poverty. They came here to be able to send money back home.

Education is the lifeline of the city of Boston in a lot of ways, as far as preparing and educating young people for the future. So when we think about that - I would love to have the $25 million dollar investment we made up to close the gap on charter schools. I'd love to make that investment in a different part of the school system if we could. The money that we're trying to adjust on transportation, I would love to, if we can save money in transportation - that's not going to be a savings, that's going to come into the general fund, that's going to be reinvested in the school.

That's what American values and ideals are all about: We can come here and be different and celebrate different faiths and be OK with that.

Clearly, I think that there have been racial problems in America for a long time. I still think that, particularly during the second half of the Obama presidency, there has been a lot of emotion, a lot of feeling stirred up.

Even though we all might have differences, there's commonality in the sense [that] people are hard-working, people want to raise a family, people want to put a roof over their head, people want to put food on their table, people want good things for their children.