The struggle is an eternal struggle. The capitalist system will confuse you. [Someone said], “our people are just a now people. They want everything now. If you tell them something for later ‘I ain’t got no time for later. I want it now!’” Capitalism makes you think that everything must come now. But the struggle that you’re involved in is a struggle in which you will not reap that which you have sown. You have already reaped that which has been sown by past generations. You must sow for future generations to reap.

I’m so tired of brothers and sisters coming in saying, “when am I going to enjoy the good life?” It ain’t for you, it’s for the next generation. Do your work now for the next generation. When you work for your people, it’s not what you receive, it’s what you give. And the best thing about working for the people is that what you really get for the people sometimes nobody else knows except you. This is real struggle for the people. Thus, we must wipe out from our minds that the struggle in which we’re involved in is going to give us any victories. The struggle in which we’re involved in is an eternal struggle. We are not working for ourselves, we are working for generations to come. Therefore, what I’ve done you ain’t even begin to see. Generations later will come to thank us for the work we’ve done now.

I’m not certain that somehow, perhaps, a burgeoning ménage à trois of political interests, corporate interests and military interests will not prevail and literally annihilate an inhabitable, humane future. Because I don’t think we can any longer rely on separation of powers, free speech, religious tolerance or unchallengeable civil liberties as a matter of course. That is, not while finite humans in the flux of time make decisions of infinite damage. Not while finite humans make infinite claims of virtue and unassailable power that are beyond their competence, if not their reach.

 […] You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human without wealth. What it feels like to be human without domination over others, without reckless arrogance, without fear of others unlike you, without rotating, rehearsing and reinventing the hatreds you learned in the sandbox. And although you don’t have complete control over the narrative (no author does, I can tell you), you could nevertheless create it.