I work as an usher in a theater on 76th and Broadway. Most nights, in addition to the regular ushers, there are one or two volunteers, ushering so as to get free tickets to the show. Tonight, the volunteers were two middleaged women, the kind with short, puffy hair and too much foundation. The closest we come to suburban housewives in New York City. These two women were chatting together... and by the time I was done seating the patrons, I was more furious than I've been in weeks.

It's the sheer fact of how ignorant people are. How willing they are to be complacent in their fear and their helplessness. It just incenses me. These women... they probably have children around my age, maybe a little younger... they talk about how the world is going to hell. Not that they'd say hell.

I know there's a recession right now. There is plenty of reason to be worried about the security of your job. But what is not all right, for me, is to assume that there is nothing you can do. That no matter what, you'll be poor and destitute, because this is how the world is right now. That life is by nature unjust. These two women, talking about politics and the economy... describing how they're sure they'll get laid off, how the world is overly dependant on technolgy (I told my husband right before the whole e-commerce thing happened that it'd never work... it makes people lazy!), how the government is conspiring against the common man, and this insipid giggling behind it all: "look! I'm being discriminated against! It's not fair! But I shan't do anything about it, because it's hopeless anyway!"

I can't stand it. What's more: September 11th. Horrific, terribly frightening, incomprehensible. I know that as well as anyone. I saw the towers fall, and I've never been that scared in my life. But damn it, I can talk about it. I don't drop my voice to a whisper when I mention it, call it "the thing that happened". It's the same way these people talk about cancer. The hushed, sick shame. I despise that.

Maybe I'm young. Maybe I'm idealistic. Maybe I'm drunk on love and ambition and a certain degree of transcendance. But these hollow people make me want to scream. The world's far too beautiful for that kind of blindness.

A lot of people have told me lately that I'm dreaming unreasonable dreams. To all of you skeptics, you cynics, you realists; to you ignorant, you frightened, you passive, you small-minded: there are no unreasonable dreams. This is the nature of dreaming. We're all alive. Be thankful for that. Thank your god and I'll thank mine, when I can understand who to thank. But for the sake of everything you love, don't waste it.

There is terror, injustice, prejudice, pain, and suffering in the world. I won't deny it. I know it. But I believe in light, goddamn it. I believe in heavenfire and I believe in life.

I'm young enough to remember the future... the way things ought to be...