Snow welcomes the stranger

It's exactly the way Alexis de Tocqueville described the phenomenon of democracy: The average citizen only notices in subtle everyday-life situations that there's someone high up in control of the citizens' lives, it's enough to awake a certain annoyance emerging from time to time but never strong enough to start a real revolution. The biggest it gets in our time is some random student protest, or maybe even a bigger demonstration against U.S.A.'s war in Iraq but that's as far as it goes. Poor Karl Marx, surely he'd be very sad his prophecy of a world's revolution never came to be realised, on the contrary, our whole society seems to have turned from the proletariat to its own kind of bourgeoisie.
Why do I write about this? While I was cycling back home today I was stopped by a huge police column who trapped me in the middle of the street and didn't allow me to ride on. A moment later I found out why: With noisy hooting another column drove by, in between the police cars and motorbikes there were various of the essential dark Mercedes, probably with lots of highly important people inside, on one car I could see the flag of a country but I didn't recognise which one. At that moment it started to snow very heavily, first time this winter! And me, in the middle of that turmoil, no way to get past the other cars who just kept going because the traffic lights had been turned off, feeling very unimportant and helpless.