by John Berger
Everywhere these days more and more people knock their heads against the fact that the future of our planet and what it will offer or deny to its inhabitants, is being decided by boards of men who control more money than all the governments in the world, who never stand for election, and whose sole criterion for every decision they take is whether or not it increases or is prone to increase Profit.
No one except those men and their ideological pupils really believes, after the evidence of the last five years, in the promises of the Free Market triumphant. Deep down people know, when they wake up at 4 a.m., that, one day, the system is going to crack. At dawn they bow their heads once again and obediently try not to go under. But the doubts are beginning. And at 4 a.m. the Subcomandante talks to us.
I get up from the bench and walk along the street in the shade under the plane trees. I pass nobody. The first leaves are falling. At the corner I go into a small shop to buy groceries. A man with a beard wearing shorts, a little younger than I, is mumbling to the shopkeeper who is a Lebanese. I gather that the shopkeeper has given him a large paper bag of black bananas because they are far too overripe to sell. Now the man is slowly counting out coins to pay for a tin. A large tin of meat for dogs. His hands tell me unequivocally that he is homeless.
The Subcomandante explains why he is addicted to postscripts:
It happens that one feels that something has remained between the fingers, that there are still some words that want to find their way into sentences, that one has not finished emptying the pockets of the soul. But it is useless, there never will be a postscript that can contain so many nightmares … and so many dreams.