I too have a dream.

what makes us human? Is it the ability to make our own way, without regard to the environment we exist in? Is it our power to shape our world around us to fit our needs? Is the feelings we possess, the things called emotions? Is it that we can come to care for other human beings, not of our own family?

Animals do all of that. In recent years, experiments and more importantly, unbiased observations have shown that animals can also possess languages, instincts, emotions, urges, those basic indicators of sentience.

But surely there is more. We can't simply be another species, living our way from birth to death, from emergence, to domination, to evolutionary death or transformation, can we? There has to be more to this life and humanity business than meets the eye, something inside us insists.

Some use the tool of religious beliefs and spirituality to further their postulates of the argument, saying that indeed, humanity is better, or atleast somehow MORE, than the countless other species cohabiting the planet with us.

Yet my question is exactly that - why does it have to be? Why do we think that human beings as a species are fundamentally different from other species? Sure, we have chainsaws to cut down the trees, harvesters and tractors to help us grow our food, and computers to help us with our species-special traits of communication, administration and justice. But in the end, we create our tools from those forests and the earth, we grow our food from the soil, we make those computers from plastics made nature and its gifts.

So then how are we fundamentally different from the others? I would rest my argument if we had special powers that let us create out of nothing, that let us alter the world in ways that other species possibly could not, even if they evolved to higher ratings on the scale of sentience.

Still, can we clap our hands and create lightning? Can we sing rain into a drought? Can we concentrate and change the shape of a mountain? Can we even lift a pebble in ways that a monkey cannot, if he learns to?

We cannot. So is there really a difference? I sincerely hope so, even if I fear there might be none in the end. Maybe someday, when we have left wars and pettiness behind, when we have learn to see others as human, and not as Caucasians, or Mongloids or Aryans and Dravidians. Maybe someday when communities as a whole in Southern California and the eastern Gangetic plains save food and wastage to help feed the poor in Nigeria and the Congo, not as a measure of pity, but as a realization of neccessity for keeping the human race human.

Maybe when we have left behind the material plane to the management of machines, along with distrustfulness, envy, greed, and insecurity of our identities. Maybe then we will find the true purpose of being human. But I fear not. I fear that we will never reach that goal. And I fear that even if someday we do, it will remain just that - a goal, not a path to the true destination. I fear that there will be no destination. I fear that when we reach our station on the subway, we will find that there is no way to get out of the underground, because there is no home to go to, just the subway to live in.

But if we never get to that state, if we never reach that subway station, we will never be able to know if that gate to the outer world is there or not.

So prove me wrong, prove my fears groundless. Show that I am being naive, when I fear that the Shias and the Sunnis, and the Catholics and the Protestants, and the governments and the Naxals, and the "terrorists/freedom fighters" and the security agencies, and the admnistrations and the people will not be able to put aside their differences.

Like Martin Luther King, I too have a dream, that the turn of the next millenium will not only see us still living on this planet, but also living together, not fighting together.

Humanity has had a long, long adolescence. I hope we don't shoot each other before we graduate from high school.