Meeting in September 2000 at the United Nations in New York at the start of the new millennium (in the Gregorian calendar) at what was labeled as the Millenium Summit, the world's leaders pledged to work toward improving the lot of the world's majority, the poor. This pledge, signed on to by the entire membership of the United Nations and a host of international nongovernmental organizations, was embodied in a set of eight specific goals that came to be called the Millennium Development Goals, to be achieved by 2015; they ranged from elimination of extreme poverty and hunger to reducing gender inequality to fighting HIV/AIDS to promoting environmental sustainability. While the agenda was indeed a worthy one, the implementation of its goals, especially by the target date, has always been in doubt and today it is accepted that it won't be met—thanks to a variety of factors ranging from the parsimony of the rich in the global North to devotion of precious resources to “making the world safe for Western corporate capitalism” to inefficiencies, corruption, and armed civil strife among the intended beneficiaries of the agenda in the global South. Question: Under the circumstances, was the Millennium Summit a waste of time? Answer: No, because to dream of a better future is the first step toward that goal (no dream, no future—just the nightmare of the present).