My generation was born with a nostalgia for democracy, a dream we inherited in infantine sleep. We awoke to a nightmare. In the dream there was not a lone man on a frontier, heading off into the sunset. Rather, everyone was there, every woman, every child, every person- we all showed up, and no one was more there than anyone else. In the nightmare, we saw ourselves standing together, but getting further and further away, as from the back of a moving train. From the nightmare we awoke alone and in fear, without anyone to tell us how we got where we are.

We awoke disembodied. We walked dispossessed, through streets rumbling in their own corpulence. We entered many doors, looking for shelter; to some of us they were open, to some of us they were not. We regarded each other through windows, outside and in. Occassionally we waved, most often we looked away quickly. Eventually, we stopped recognizing one another.

At nigth we dreamed the nightmare, and awoke to live it all over again. Or occassionally we dreamed the dream, and the waking was sadder. Some of us mistook the nightmare for the dream. In that dream, everyone else was standing in back of the train, and only we were on board, and we wondered why. As they got further away, we did not wave. We mistook being on the train for being happy- we thought the train was going somewhere. In the dream, or in the nightmare awake, the train later derailed. We got off and wondered where we were, and why no one else was around. We looked down the track, hoping for another train to come along.