In the battle to draw up battle lines, individual lives and names are lost in favor of large abstract political causes. So the "little man" becomes the focal point for activists campaigning for the challenger in San Francisco's mayoral runoffs -- and for protesters at the WTO meetings in Seattle. But one of the realities of the global era is that the "little man" no longer exists, and maybe never did. Commentator Mark Schurmann, an ex-barback and boxer, teaches writing in PNS' Beat Within program in Bay Area juvenile halls. This is the first of several articles by teenage and twenty-something writers exploring the political landscape at the end of the century.

SAN FRANCISCO -- There's a lady on the street corner in downtown San Francisco, urging us to register to vote in the upcoming runoff between incumbent Willie Brown and his challenger, Tom Ammiano.

"Save our city from political cronyism, a vote for Tom Ammiano is a vote for the little man," she crows, her accent more Queens than San Francisco, till the sun sets and the financial district empties out.

I wonder who she's talking about when she says "the little man." I wonder if she's talking about herself.

In Seattle last week lines were drawn between the global economy and protestors, geared for a battle between transnational corporations and that same "little man."

As I read about it in the morning paper, that question crossed my mind again: "Who's the little man supposed to be?"

It can't be me. I certainly don't think of myself as a little man. I'm 26 years old, well built and decent looking. I've no problems with eating at posh restaurants and I have a desire to get rich as quick as I can. Yet, by government standards, I live below the poverty line, I don't have any credit cards and I don't have a college education. Could she possibly be referring to me? I don't think so. I'm too clean cut, and I can pass for a yuppie.

So who's this little man whom we need to protect by abolishing the WTO, and voting Tom Ammiano into office? Is it the migrant workers? The alienated bike messengers? The squatters? Maybe it's all those artists living in warehouse lofts where rental prices are going through the roof. Do they consider themselves "little people?"

I went to a somewhat exclusive private high school in San Francisco. The faculty preached tolerance, diversity and community as if they were three of the original ten commandments. In my junior year, a young lady was expelled from the school because she hung out with skinheads and was quoted in another high school paper making racist remarks. "We have no tolerance for those kinds of statements nor room in this community for that kind of student." I remember her tears to this day, tears she shed for being an outcast in a community of "tolerant people." Was she "the little man" progressives talk about?

The mayor's race in San Francisco has been drawn along lines that distinguish between the dispossessed little man and money-hungry corporations. The lady on Market street tells us that one vote saves San Francisco and the other damns it.

I'm more inclined towards damning the city. I'm more inclined to give this city away to big business and let the little man do what he's always done very well -- take care of himself.

I think about all those people who work for The Gap and Old Navy, many younger than eighteen, who probably couldn't find jobs anywhere else. I think about the bike messengers from NYC and SF whom I've known, and I wonder where they found the money or the time to go to Zurich (the city with the highest standard of living in the world) for the bike messenger world championships.

I ask myself how undocumented immigrants can make $200 a night bussing tables and sweeping floors if they couldn't work in upscale restaurants fueled by the global economy and the bull market.

"Little men" don't make that kind of money nor do they take trips to Switzerland.

So who, then, is the little man and how has society dispossessed him? I think he or she must be a figment of our imagination.

We live in a gilded age, an age of transition, where borders are disappearing. Without benefit of technology, young men and women in Michoacan, Mexico, know just where to find work in San Francisco or far away in New York City. Young Americans, leaving the cities, have begun to usurp the role of immigrant field workers, picking blueberries in Maine, or beets in Minnesota, or harvesting cranberries in California. It's almost funny to see young, hip, white people in San Francisco's predominantly Latino Mission District, protesting the gentrification process they themselves began.

In the battle to draw up battle lines, individual lives and names are lost in favor of large abstract political causes.

History teaches that good intentions have hurt as much as they've helped. After all, the fascists of Italy and Germany were considered progressive for their day. Their ideology was built on making those same distinctions between the little man and the oppressive wealthy. European Jews, who weathered the storm of depression during the early thirties, became that same nameless and faceless threat to "the little man" we hear so much about on the streets of San Francisco and Seattle.

But maybe I'm stretching it with that analogy.