Maybe it will be hundreds of thousands. Maybe, finally, at last and just in time, someone will rise to whatever historic occasion presents itself. All these maybes are hopes and nothing more. Like dreams or nightmares, they are spoken aloud only by those unafraid of mockery and ridicule. Fear, of course, is at the heart of the debate.
Fear is the great equalizer, the perfect excuse.
Fear is the great paralyzer. Petrifying action, freezing thought, fear exonerates those guilty of making proimises that cannot be kept. It is being said that never before has the gap here been greater between those who rule and those who are ruled. Between the crowded bus and the chauffeur-driven Volvo, is the same gap that exists between the rhetoric of love of the land and the reality of its physical degradation and uglification. Between the broken public payphones and the cellular telephones is the same gap that exists between the reality of the transience of every single person and the self-delusion that ascribes permanence to any human condition.