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I know people socially who live in countries where the wealth gap is more extreme than it is in America, and they live with full-time security. They live with the threat of getting kidnapped, or they live with the threat of people invading their homes.

If everybody lives in the same way, there's something almost narcotizing about it, but the true misery of economic class difference is knowing that you can't have what somebody else does.

But social justice and the environment are very tied together in my head.

Social justice is what drives me; it's why I'm here.

When I go to Africa and spend more time there with people who are the least of the least, those in desperate situations, I am broken by it. But I also find people with so much more joy and freedom living with nothing than I see walking down the streets of my own community here in Tennessee.

We see many who are struggling against adversity who are happy, and more although abounding in wealth, who are wretched.

Certainly I'll never be able to put myself in the situation that people growing up in the less developed countries are in. I've gotten a bit of a sense of it by being out there and meeting people and talking with them.

I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result.

That human beings seek their own well-being and that of those close to them is not an especially provocative discovery. What is important is that this universal aspect of human nature persists no matter what economic system is in place; it merely expresses itself in different forms.

We have seen that in this country in the last few years, particularly on Wall Street, with the rise of the old human frailty of greed. This occurs when people begin to serve only their own needs to the detriment of everyone else.