When I was inside, I stayed in touch with people all over the country and different parts of the world. In an ironic kind of way, despite being in a cell, but having this kind of written communication with people, it sort of gave me an insight on to what was going on from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine. From Australia to Spain. What I used to tell people when they got more cynical about nothing really happening out there in terms of activism; it's just the same people doing the same things. I would tell them, there's a lot of activism, and a lot of it is localized. Act local, but a lot of these people are thinking international. A lot of the problems that people in West Virginia have might be the same problems that people in Bolivia have. Particularly if they are from the same class, so I was always hopeful, and not cynical, about this level of political activism. But what I see, unlike the years prior to when I went in prison, there's a lot of motion. In other words, activism is happening, but there's no movement, in the sense that it's not organized, regionally and nationally, the way we've seen movements in the past. Anti-war movements, civil-rights movements, any number of things. It stays local, despite all the efforts to get it to the next level. I think those efforts have been largely unsuccessful. Whereas in the years before I went in, you could identify a movement or a radical push or different organizations and movements that were connected to each other across regions. You really felt like you were part of something bigger, and that you shared this vision with people. I don't see that as much now. I don't see it near as much, but there are still a lot of people out there doing solid work. Right here in the state of Maine there's solitary confinement legislation. That bill ended up involving a lot of people, and it caught a lot of attention. It put the issue out there, where it hadn't been out there before. I'm going to a meeting the day before I leave for Massachusetts. The Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition is meeting in Augusta, and that meeting is about carrying forward that particular legislative effort. The effort in Maine caught the attention of people trying to do similar things in other states, Massachusetts and Illinois, for example. So the potential is there, not only to build a more substantial prison-reform movement in Maine, but the potential is also there to hook up with people in other states, to share ideas and resources so that it take a bigger form. But I would never argue that activism is the same now as it was then. When I got out, one of the most palpable things that I noticed — and I can give you all kinds of examples of what it's like to come out from those walls after 20 years, what it's like to get behind the wheel of a car for the first time, all of that — but as a politically oriented person, one of the first things I noticed was this fear in people. This fear and uncertainty in people about the political situation in this country, and people worrying about how to pay the bills and keep their job, but in particular, the way people viewed things politically. There was palpable fear, and that kind of fear is demobilizing. It erodes people's sense of what they need to do, so they're only reactive, you know? They're not proactive. It paralyzes people in a way, in terms of, they realize something has to be done but they're afraid to do it. They don't know what to do. I think that was probably the fallout from 9/11 to some degree. I wasn't out for 9/11. I was in a cell, so I had a different view of it. But that was my sense, and the longer we go, from one generation to the next, without keeping up that legacy of political activism, the more difficult it will be to get it back on track. I meet with a lot of young people all the time that don't have any sense of activism. I mean, I work with many young activists, but I meet many more young people who have no sense of activist history at all. I can't assume any more, when I speak in public — if I say Attica, or Wounded Knee, or Watergate, or even the Vietnam War — the young people don't have any substantive understanding of what those terms mean. I have to qualify anything I say in terms of that context, but hope springs eternal.
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