We need to send hundreds of millions of dollars down to our public high schools, vocational colleges, and community colleges to begin training people in the green-collar work of the future - things like solar-panel installation, retrofitting buildings that are leaking energy, wastewater reclamation, organic food, materials reuse and recycling.

If you look at my career over the past twenty years, I've always been trying to look around corners for low-income communities of color.

You had a socialist get 47 percent of the votes in the Democratic primary: Bernie Sanders. You have an outright white nationalist populist [Donald Trump] who is now in the White House with an authoritarian strongman who has no regard for facts, no regard for tradition, and no regard for the Constitution. That is what you get when you import third world conditions. You get third world politics, and that's where we are now.

A family-friendly "eco-populism" can mobilize and unite millions who, at this point, would be turned off by a more extreme set of demands. The momentum will build, through these early efforts, for more comprehensive solutions.

Americans need to see people who are honestly trying to learn from each other, even as we make our own points powerfully and fight for our own values and policies.

If the road to social transformation can be paved only by saints who never make mistakes, the road will NEVER be built.

I am not, in fact, a superhero. Just a humble, mild-mannered civil rights attorney.