It's very easy to leave when things go wrong, but to stick around and to basically give life to a town because of everything that it gave you generation after generation after generation, that to me is what defines a true American.
It wasn't until I was in that world, directing shows and movies, that I realized basically my job is to give back to another generation what the generation before me gave to me.
What I want to do is basically tell my generation's story about how music and culture helped affect a generation, and a generation that's so profound, that it went on to elect the first African-American president.
Ten years have now passed since many of us first felt the jolt of history-when the second plane crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. We knew from that moment that things can go terribly wrong in our world-not because life is unfair, or moral progress impossible, but because we have failed, generation after generation, to abolish the delusions of our ignorant ancestors.
My parents gave up a lot to bring me up in the little house on the prairie, and I wasn't prepared to make those sacrifices, nor was the generation before me and the generation after.
I think with each generation comes more opportunity. At least that's the way that I see it. I grew up in a generation that watched the birth of the internet. We all have. But I feel like I look around at the generation younger than me and it's a very opportunistic mantra.
Many of us, of course, have children, and I think that the type of country that we are going to leave in our wake by rewarding bad behavior... is not a better handoff to the next generation and generation after that.
Hurt people hurt people. That's how pain patterns gets passed on, generation after generation after generation. Break the chain today. Meet anger with sympathy, contempt with compassion, cruelty with kindness. Greet grimaces with smiles. Forgive and forget about finding fault. Love is the weapon of the future.
We have seen communities cry out in pain, generation after generation, because of racism and police brutality.
Young people have traditionally skewed left through generation after generation after generation. Exceptions to that, of course. I am one. I never have been a liberal. I rebelled against my parents, but not that way. Never been a liberal. Constitutionally incapable of being a liberal. Who knows why.
There's the generation that made the rules, the generation that codified them. The generation that broke them - that's mine. The generation that laughed at them - that's Tarantino's. And now there's a generation that doesn't know that there were any.
To have a body of work is a blessing - when you have songs that have been around generation after generation that they call timeless music, you can work that for a long time.
Generation after generation, there is this never-ending, contemptuous, condescending attitude to the next generation or the next way of thinking: music, art, politics, whatever. And I have never been like that.
You know, I think of the global economy as an inverted triangle, resting on the shoulders of the American consumer. And if the American consumer cannot have enough disposable income in order to maintain a standard of living that creates more opportunities generation after generation, that's bad for everybody.
American government did not originate in any abstract theories about liberty and equality, but in the actual experience gained by generation after generation of English colonists in managing their own political affairs. The Revolution did not make a breach in the continuity of their institutional life.
But probably that's the way of the world - when we have finally learned something we're too old to apply it - and so it goes, wave after wave, generation after generation. No one learns anything at all from anyone else.
What I like best about baseball is the continuity. Generation after generation can follow the game and get the same satisfactions year after year and bring to it the same interest and spirit. I want to take that with me into the next century.