All my life I've been involved with racial politics. I was a Freedom Rider in the South. I was the author of books on gang violence, I was a community organizer in Newark, New Jersey, and when I spoke to the Black Caucus, congressional and state, I realized they were going all the way for Hillary [Clinton] and so was the Latino caucus in Sacramento and I asked myself this question: "Do I really want to cast my vote against these people who have been central to my life and to the soul of the country?" And so I went with them. Period.

Then you have [Donald] Trump. So it could be the tightest, most hazardous race in political history and we can't afford to allow Trump to slither through. So that's where I'm at.

It was gonna be a race [2016] that set a foundation for the Left in the future. But given the math, I didn't think he was gonna make it. And so I started to shift to Hillary [Clinton] and to discussions of the platform and discussions of what to do.

We ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is' that there is no viable alternative to the present.

I was raised in an Irish-American home in Detroit where assimilation was the uppermost priority. The price of assimilation and respectability was amnesia. Although my great-grandparents were victims of the Great Hunger of the 1840's, even though I was named Thomas Emmet Hayden IV after the radical Irish nationalist exile Thomas Emmet, my inheritance was to be disinherited. My parents knew nothing of this past, or nothing worth passing on.

Gentrification and consumerism... have destroyed the character of my favorite American haunts, like North Beach, Berkeley, Venice and Aspen.

His herding instinct is so strong that he confuses tractors on a baseball field for sheep. He was hospitalized twice. Once by a line drive and once for attacking a tractor tread.