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10:30 a.m. The knocking at the front door was loud and persistent. A D.C. police officer wanted to know if I had heard anything unusual around dawn that morning.

Nothing unusual. The streets had been noisy the night before—folks out sitting on their stoops until late and playing music loudly in celebration of the warm weather that had just arrived. People were in and out of the crackhouse across the street. But there had been no gunshots, no cries for help that night.

The police officer took me to the porch two doors down—Thelma's porch. The large front window had been knocked out; shattered glass lay everywhere. Thelma came out and explained that somebody had picked up a chair off her porch and threw it through the window. He was being chased by a man with a gun at the time and took refuge in Thelma's living room.

"This is it for me," Thelma said. "I've lived here for 26 years. Raised my kids here. They all graduated from Cardoza and got good jobs." She nodded toward the high school at the end of the block. "But I can't take it anymore."

It wasn't only the violence that was getting to Thelma. Her landlord had raised the rent, she said, to $1,100 a month—an outrageous sum for a small house on which he refused to do repairs. Thelma vowed to be gone as soon as she could figure out where to go. Her grandchildren, who live with her and play hide-and-seek on the long row of our connected porches, will be gone as well.

I'd Like A Window Seat, No Faxing, Please

Frequent flyers are reacting with suspicion to the announcement that the airlines will soon be providing on-board facsimile service to their passengers. Laptop computers are bad enough, said a friend who inevitably ends up between a pair of eager computer slaves clacking away at their keyboards. But now you won't even be able to go to the bathroom without threading your way through the lines of people waiting to use the fax.

Alarmed by this latest development, we here at the H'rumphs Megatrends Desk predict the following scenario for the future.

NEWS ITEM, DATELINE 2001: The Federal Aviation Administration, in its strictest move since the 1990 ban on smoking aboard airliners, limited in-flight fax transmissions to transcontinental routes. The ruling comes a scant six months after the FAA required all faxing passengers to sit at the rear of the airplane, thus freeing up the bulk of seating for non-faxers.

One airline spokesperson predicted major fallout from the business community, noting that some travelers cannot be expected to fly for even an hour or two without faxing. Asked about the recent Surgeon General's report citing the societal damage of fax abuse, the source noted another study commissioned by the airlines that came to the opposite conclusion. "Our study shows that fax use is a personal choice, of no detriment to the transmitter, nor to anyone in the same room.

On the first day of Nelson Mandela's visit to the United States, a million people came to see him. Massive numbers of people, especially from New York City's black neighborhoods, gave the South African leader the warmest and most amazing welcome anyone could remember. Gov. Mario Cuomo said it was the most emotional event he had ever seen in all his years in politics.

In the few short months since being freed from 27 years in prison, Nelson Mandela has come to symbolize more than the hope of a free South Africa. He has become an inspiration to people seeking freedom and human rights all over the world.

"To have a black man imprisoned for so long and emerge with such strength and power strengthens black people everywhere," said a black woman in the sea of humanity that lined the streets for Mandela's ticker-tape parade. Many brought their children, saying they wanted their sons and daughters to be a part of this historic moment and to be able to tell their grandchildren that they saw Nelson Mandela. When a television reporter asked a 12-year-old boy what Nelson Mandela said to him that day, the young man paused to think and then replied, "He loved me."

I was staying with friends in the South Bronx that night in order to attend a meeting the next morning of Nelson Mandela and a hundred U.S. religious leaders. I arose early and made my way across the center of Harlem en route to Riverside Church on New York's Upper West Side. When I came to the intersection of Martin Luther King Boulevard and Malcolm X Boulevard, I smiled at the thought of how happy the two great American leaders would have been on this day.