No police department should hire more quickly than they can assimilate the people that they bring in, and we did. I take responsibility for it. It was the first opportunity I had to hire, and I wanted to do it, and I take responsibility.
I was so beat down as a young person - being black, being gay, being unable to assimilate because I could never, ever pull off being butch.
To become an American citizen, we require people to read, write and speak in English. That is to help them to assimilate in our melting pot, truly to become Americans. We mock that when the cherished right to vote does not involve English any more.
My grandfather came over from Puerto Rico and raised his kids speaking English so that it would be easier for them to assimilate.
A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.
I also think we need to maintain distinctions - the doctrine of creation is different from a scientific cosmology, and we should resist the temptation, which sometimes scientists give in to, to try to assimilate the concepts of theology to the concepts of science.
The Internet may well disempower the nation state, but at the same time, it also strengthens certain specific state functions - like surveillance. As a political entity, it doesn't empower the nation sate. It creates the availability of much more data than the digestive system of the nation state could possibly assimilate.
I don't like to go to the movies to see violence or some kind of spy thing with all kinds of information you have to assimilate to understand the plot.
I believe that when the going gets tough, you should just hit pause. Assimilate what is happening for 10 minutes. Your thoughts will be much clearer.
As a leader, you have to have the ability to assimilate new information and understand that there might be a different view.