I Haven't Been Silent. I Teach, I

Writing A Memoir Has A Particularly Excited Sense Of Narcissism.

Let's Look At Two Things Real Quickly: The Civil Rights Movement In Mississippi In The Sixties And The Arab Spring Starting In Tunisia And Cairo. What They Had In Common Was People Who Were Told, And Who Believed Inside Themselves, That They Were A Certain Way, And The Society At Large Believed It.

I Was From My Little Perch In A Prep School I Saw The Civil Rights Movement And It Was Defining The Moral Dimensions Of The Time And I Was Drawn To It And I Read James Baldwin And Read Invisible Man And These Were My Touch Points. But It Was When I Got To Michigan And Saw A Bigger World, A Real World, That I Got Involved.

I'm Wary Of Government. Part Of [the Tea Party] Impulse Is To Dislike And Be Worried About The Rich. I'm That Way Too. So I Don't Find Them To Be As Atrocious As Most People Do, As Your Liberals Do. I'm Not A Liberal.

I Knew Barack Obama, Absolutely. And I Knew Him Probably As Well As Thousands Of Other Chicagoans.