Last night 250 people were slaughtered in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Belgrade, Yugoslavia was bombed, and I got my eight hours of sleep knowing the park down the street looked fine. The homeless, our human garbage, had been cleaned out. We can sleep through the economic catastrophe of Indonesia where 80 million people can't afford to eat. We can sleep through legal executions in US prisons, where other inmates are anesthetized against the horror by being shown pornographic films. How can you sleep? How much are we willing to sleep through? Sleeping is not just a physiological state. It's our modern politics, our way of relating to the world. It's our contemporary form of social denial. When the alarm bell of reality rings we hit the snooze button. Worn out by daily exposure to homelessness, poverty, famine, war, exhausted by unlimited consumer choice, we switch off, and snooze. But the world doesn't stop turning. We are becoming a species of sleepwalkers. And if we sleep through it all, we deserve to perish. Are you still reading this or have you dozed off? We've been numbed by a general anesthetic. Our eyes are open but are blind to pain. And the worst ot if is, sedation is constant. It is systematic. It is the work of the new sleeping class. The global media are a sedative. We're made weary by having to hold an opinion on the latest film, the latest fashion, and the latest manufactured controversy. Even our dreams are produced by the sleeping class. The dreamworld of cinema is being shaped by the Multiplex. When films need to fill theaters the size of football stadiums they can't afford to wake us up. Because advertisers know we watch TV with our minds half-asleep, they can sell us instant happiness - fake butter and bubblegum-flavored toothpaste. Why wake up when you can buy scented toiled paper? Our world rots but my ass smells sweet. And if you wake up to what's going on, you are ridiculed. It's easier to hit the snooze button, rather than do something. The sleeping class think that the world as it is now is the only way it can be. They're too busy to have imagination because it's hard work maintaining your cynicism. We don't have to buy this version of reality. We do have waking class heroes. Like the Spaniard Baltasar Garzón. He refused to sleep through a world in which former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, responsible for torture, could share a cup of tea with Margaret Thatcher, ex-British prime minister. By filing charges to bring Pinochet to justice he did the unimaginable. But you don't have to be a Spanish judge to set an alarm call. There are local heroes. Like the schoolkid who refuses to accept the reality created by the school bully. By standing up to him he changes a world. Or the volunteer who answers phones on the Childline for homeless children in India. Or the Age Concern volunteer who doesn't accept the condition of old people in poverty. The point is not to press the snooze button. But the sleeping class are relentless. The sleepwalkers of the world unite, and the clock is ticking. And we are not only sleeping, we are in danger of falling into a coma. "Coma" derived from the Greek word meaning "state of sleep", is the lowest level of brain functioning before death. It's easy to snooze. But the clock is ticking. And only the dead sleep well.

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