Cold Beer and Hot Politics. Chapter 6.

The weeks following John's passionate speech at Speaker's Corner crept by in agonising inertia. No righteous comrades emerged to join his crusade, no groundswell of dissent stirred even a tremor of outrage. His provocations were met largely by public apathy or dismissal, save the occasional phone call from an old university friend expressing concern over John's tilt at windmills.

He still awoke before dawn most days, steeping bitter tea as faint light seeped into his bleak kitchen. But the fired-up vigour that first propelled him into the streets now cooled to embittered embers. The musty mimeograph machine sat largely dormant, its sporadic attempts at counterculture propaganda increasingly half-hearted.

As spring slowly blossomed outside John's smudged window, so too dawned an acknowledgement within of his own powerlessness. What lone elderly man, after all, could compel the powerful to yield their interests in favour of the greater societal good? Modern institutional corruption and greed were hydra-headed monsters, far too abstract and entrenched for any grassroots agitation to combat. The comfortable ruling class knew all too well that the struggling masses had grown desensitised to the endless litany of their moral failings. They had only to toss occasional sops to quell suffrage movements.

John still watched evening bulletins with disgust as party leaders spat petty insults in Parliament, utterly anaesthetised to real citizen suffering. But the old flashfire call to dissent now kindled barely a flicker in his chest. The enormity of forces structured against systemic change slowly crushed the last breath from John's revivalist spirit.

Thus the weeks wore on, hope's bright banner sinking ever lower on John's horizon. He glimpsed flickers of radical impulse in London's youth, passing the tattered 'Smash Injustice!' flyers still clinging to alley brickwork. But apathy still ruled the sullen public mood. As John tallied another stack of useless manifestos, stark doubts resurfaced. If breaching institutional barricades ultimately proved impossible for a lone voice, then why continue justifying this bleak charade called survival?