We´ve reached our true destination - San Cristobal de las Casas. Walking through here, seeing the same plaza where lied so many bloody bodies the first day of 1994 is truly like … it´s hard to explain. Like Naomi Klein said, we grew up as the supposed generation after history ended, not actually expecting to see it take place ourselves. And yet here I am seeing the same Municipal building where the Zapatistas declared ¨Ya Basta,¨ a declaration often compared to Martin Luther´s ¨I have a dream¨ in ambition, clarity, and prose.

San Cristobal … the Zapatistas. It´s the closest the left has come to succeeding since the Sandanistas in Nicaragua or Allende in Chile. But just take a look around - look at everyone here from everywhere - and it´s very obvious that the world is now a much different place than it was in the 70´s and 80´s. Like gossip circulating around a small town, it now spreads around a small world. And no one has used that to their advantage better than the EZLN.

The Zapatistas may not succeed, but they will not be forgotten and that is because someone in management has realized that in order to get someone, especially a young person, interesten in an ideology, you must first create an iconographic identity for that person to follow. A fashion. Looking cool comes first, saving the world follows.

Zapatismo - the fashion, not what it stands for - is so cool, so fly, that it will endure as long as Levis, as long as Che, as long as rock and roll. Look at this photo of a Zapatista:
It is glue. It is an identity to attach yourself to without the complexities of saying your American or white or Mexican or Chicano or black or Africa or straight or gay. It´s what we´ve all wanted, to hide behind that mask, to disassociate ourselves from the sins of our forefathers, to lose ourselves fighting for something noble and look cool while doing it.

Here in Chiapas is an answer to our conservative parents who want the best for their children and will support those who promise just that. Here in Chiapas is an answer for the skepticism of the post-modern here is something worth fighting for. This is justice, equality, something that lies in the heart of every man and woman, pre-modern, modern, or post-modern.

This small Southern Mexican state of rocky cliffs and thick sub-tropical jungle is the epitome of everything that is wrong with the world and always has been since evolution first shifted into gear: we don´t accept what is different. We fight it. We don´t want it to survive, fearful that it will threaten our existence.

That is the key that I´ve just now come to understand, that evolution is a process which depends not so much on survival as fear. It is the foundation of pre-emption. Fear that we, or our children, will not survive in the future, that we are not the fittest. It is why airplanes are steered into buildings. It is why we bombed Afghanistan. It is why we invaded Iraq. It is the hamster that never tires, pushing the clogs and gears of history.

But what is incredible. What amazes me just as much as it amazed Gramsci is that so many of us are aware of this process, have reached an understanding, and yet it continues despite calls of protest. Fear, racing ahead of reason.

I´m tired of all the talk about us, the apathetic generation. I´m tired of hearing twenty something kiss ups complaining at dinner parties to the parents of their friends that our generation just doesn´t care anymore when these little pricks have never picked up a newspaper in their lives to find out what people their age are doing around the world. I´m tired of kids in Mexico listening to Ricky Martin and smoking cigarettes in Sanbornes talking about how Mexico needs another revolution, how Poncho Villa was so ¨chingon.¨ There is a fight going on all over the world. There are tons of causes worth fighting for and if you don´t it is because you are apathetic, not your generation.

Look at Davos, Switzerland just three days ago. Look at Monterey, Mexico last week. Or Cancun a few months ago. These people are making a difference, they are forcing negotiations, they are allowing groups like OXFAM to get their feet in the door. I salute them and wish I had more huevos to join them, to make more of a difference.

Pessimism is cool and it will always win any politics discussion over a 6 pack or bottle of wine. But change, forging the world at a painfully slow pace, like carving stone with sand paper, is something amazing.