Holding the dream

Amsterdam continues to surprise ... at the moment the city is housing several excellent museum exhibitions, as well as presenting top-rate films (some of which I saw recently in Torino (at the Turin Film Festival)).
First the exhibitions: today I went to see the Nieuwe Kerk's exhibition about three men who had a dream about the society in which they grew up.
Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, and Nelson Mandela.
Inside the lofty late-medieval church with its soaring ceiling and intricate carved statues and pillars, the show was staged, giving a totally un-cramped vision of these three men who each burned with the passion to bring justice into their area of the the world (I'm just wondering about that sentence ...)
I found it very moving and often distressing to watch the films, showing police brutality and blatant racism, and to witness so much human suffering.
As always when I see a film or videos like this, I ping-pong between anger at the cruelty shown, and a half-despairing sense of my own inadequacy to deal with the sheer wickedness in the world.  But what triumphs is a longing for justice.
So I leave the church with its resonances from the past four hundred years (racism, Occupation, killings) and I walk home through the cold wet streets still thronged with tourists (I hear their many different languages) to my safe home (built by the worthy wealthy of Amsterdam for Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in 17th-century France) and I go next door to feed my neighbour's cat, because his owner is away and the cat would be lonely. I talk to him (he's a very intelligent animal and knows me) and I ask him how his world is today, and he purrs.
The beautiful, throbbing joyful purr that only a cat knows how to make.
Here he is:

He rarely puts out his claws, and never to me.