People feel repressed by their own governments; they feel unfairly treated by the outside world; they wake up in the morning, and who do they see - they see people being shot and killed: all Muslims from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Darfur.
I try not to cover Sudan from afar. I feel really uncomfortable writing about Sudan when I'm not there. It always looks different. When you're outside Sudan it's easy to lose sight of how much of what happens is driven by local politics. And when you're in America in particular, there's this sense that what D.C. has to say is the only thing that counts. Unsurprisingly people in Sudan don't feel the same way.
If I look at the really important questions in [Middle East] region, I see Iran, where there is a strong desire for a freer society and where people are repressed by a small group of ayatollahs. I see Syria, where we can see a similar desire of the people to be free. These two countries fund Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations and are hurting our efforts in Afghanistan and have been extremely harmful in Iraq. Then I also see large, important countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
The main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia. We turn on the TV and see what blew up in Iraq or we see conditions in Afghanistan.
Iraq and Afghanistan will, over time, become stable. But the War on Terror will continue long after Iraq and Afghanistan have had success in standing up their own governments.
When a lot of people wake up in the morning and put on their underwear, the first thing they feel that day is terrible about themselves. When you see that your body is not what other people want, it can be really devastating. I have so many friends that I grew up with who have had serious eating disorders.
When I wake up in the morning I want to feel hungry for life. Desire is what drives me. When I go to sleep, I feel I have experienced a small death, so that I can wake up in the morning renewed and reborn.
I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day.
I don't actually think I'm treated unfairly or anything. If anything, I sometimes can't understand why I don't see myself and the people I know represented more in films. Unless I'm going to go out and write them myself, I don't feel like I can really complain about it.
The most enlightened people in the world embrace their full potential of light and dark. When you're with people who recognize and own their negative qualities, you never feel judged by them. It's only when people see good and bad, right and wrong, as qualities outside themselves that judgments occur.
Saddam Hussein was undoubtedly a brutal dictator who had attacked Iraq's neighbours, repressed and killed many of his own people, and was in violation of obligations imposed by the U.N. Security Council.
Well, first, the situation in Afghanistan is much better than it was. But there is no comparison between Afghanistan and Iraq. Iraq has a bureaucracy, Iraq has wealth. Iraq has an educated class of people who are positioned to come in and take over.
I see myself in all the people in the world who are suffering and who are very badly treated and who are often made to feel that they have no place on this Earth.
Despite the increase in world attention toward Sudan in the past months, the genocide in Darfur has continued without any serious attempt by the Sudanese government to do what governments primarily exist to do, protect their citizens.
Governments have been ceding power to big multinational corporations in the market. We see the manifest in a variety of ways. Where governments are giving up power to big international institutions like the World Trade Organization or NAFTA, which are disabling governments' ability to protect the rights of their own people.
As far as all players [being unfairly connected], people have their own opinions, and they're usually from the outside looking in. I don't listen to someone who is on the outside of what we're dealing with every day on the inside.
In the Middle East, Iraq, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland, and many other places in the world, religion has been so divisive that people have killed one another, believing they were doing the work of God.