Waiting for the Hammer to Fall

A true classic is the one you keep re-discovering, time and time again, it brings something new from where there was something already; layers and layers of wonderful things - inside or outside - are arisen from letters, images, movements and notes that haven't changed in ages, but wait for us to change and discover their true meaning.

Queen is one of these classics. Amidst the end of the world - as it keeps coming again and again - this British band felt the cold war as Europeans did: not as a Hollywood propaganda movie where kids program whopper computers using wardialers, or where mad colonels hijack bombers that trigger doomsday devices, or suave spies that get the girl, kill the commie and win the poker hand. Every day, every news was one step closer to Armageddon as both superpowers fought to develop the most powerful weapon.

"The best move is not to play", said Joshua after playing tic-tac-toe; but for one generation this was not an option, the race for Berlin created a rift in Europe where people just saw how a Thatcher, a Reagan and a Gorbachev where sometimes just a millimeter away from total world destruction, where the Hammer would finally fall.

It was not a matter of if it would happen, but when will it happen; with the perceived impossibility of action against the most hardcore governments of the free world, a sense of inevitability and frustration imbued the young, only to be beautifully interpreted by Brian May in "Hammer to Fall", an hymn of acknowledgment of this feeling, but with a rebellious sound that turn it more into a shout for action than a dullness lullaby.

The same sense of inevitability and frustration fills me know. I'm a firm believer that shit is not even close to the fan in our country; and that the Hammer - in the form of reform, repression and/or human rights violations - is about to fall. Soon. and these are the days before the storm hits, the days where we're still young and innocent, that Hope still marches with us and the dream is fresh in our minds.

And so we walk, we march, talk and write; with more fears ones than others. But the fight, my fight - the memory war - is yet to begin; and that's the fight we really need to win.

KX.- Tall and proud, in the shadow of the mushroom cloud