Even The Worst People Know Things You Don't. I Can Prove It.

How to be more correct.

My first experience with political activism wasn’t invigorating—it was completely alienating.

I was a freshman in college, and I joined the Redwood Action Team at Stanford (RATS) for a city council meeting in Mendocino—a coastal town north of San Francisco. We were there to protest the logging of the Northern California redwoods. 

At the time, an environmental activist named Julia Butterfly Hill was living in one of those redwoods. We called her on a cellphone, and she gave us a pep talk, on speaker, from her redwood tree.

It was exciting… but something didn’t fit my expectations.

The people we were protesting against looked like humble people, not the greedy caricatures of corporate loggers I’d imagined. They were with their families, and many looked like migrant workers. I thought to myself: I don’t want to be on the opposite side of those people. I want to be on the same side as the trees and the people. The way these lines are drawn doesn’t make sense.

That was the end of my involvemen…