We need to clean up our act, says Mills.

Question: What should we be doing?

D. Quinn Mills: I think we need, let me talk with the United States first. We need to clean up our act. If we are going to provide leadership to the world then free speech ought to mean something other than protection for pornography for example. I think we got an very confused about these kinds of things and I think our act is pretty bad. If you are outside the United States and you look it, what you see primarily is our popular culture, which is sex, drugs and violence. We had somehow come to some kind of an accommodation with that, much of the world doesn’t minding to do with that and they have a very good reason for that. In the world outside the United States, we do not have an effectively operating international system at this point of time, I don’t think that something like UN, which is kind of or it is useful to have an agency for discussion, but it is not a decision making effective body. So, we need some kind of a better accommodation in a better system among the great powers to try to keep peace. Now, it is difficult to do that right now, because we are not sure to great power are anymore and the Russians are trying to get back in the group, the Chinese are trying to resort themselves much more stronger and that is going to be a very difficult period of time for us in the next couple in decades, that is the biggest single problem, geopolitically in the world. Individually I think each of us should be trying to improve ourselves. Our skills, our character, I think that should go on, I think we should each look beyond and that should go on all over lives. Secondly, we should look beyond our immediate relationships in families to a role in a broader community. I think we should have some curiosity and interest in the things that would go on in the world about us. So, those are the things and that requires us to overcome what is an enormous I think suspicion of the broader society of the political, not that it does not deserve it to some degree, but a kind of an enormous cynicism that exist in the society.

Recorded on: 9/27/07