It will be a while -- months, years maybe -- before we can get a perspective on what happened this week in Seattle, but my hunch is that we were watching history.

For one, the sheer volume of concern, and its intensity, was astonishing. Last week, world trade was a topic for specialists and the Financial Times. Now, it has been splashed across the front pages of nearly every newspaper in the world and covered relentlessly on television. As Calif. State Sen. Tom Hayden, a veteran of the Vietnam anti-war movement who was teargassed by Seattle police Tuesday night, said: "Yesterday no one in the U.S. knew the term ‘WTO.’ Now they do, and they know it’s bad."

Whether this infamy will last longer than 15 minutes remains to be seen. I bet yes.

Seldom if ever have environmentalists and labor organizers worked so closely and so well as in the past week. Add in hundreds of people from the developing world concerned about labor and natural resources, plus such formerly arcane subjects as food security, patents on plants and animals, intellectual property rights, "transparency," and all the rest, and we’ve seen in action a loose coalition of dozens of separate but related concerns that, as we heard again and again, "sent a powerful message."

The trick -- and it will be damned tricky -- is to keep it together, strengthen it, and keep pulling in the same direction.

The public has now heard of free trade and the WTO, and it’s heard as well that millions of people think the system is out of whack and must be fixed. Even the violence has not diminished the message. The mainstream press, to its credit, did a pretty good job of distinguishing among troublemakers using legitimate protest as a shield for a little boisterous vandalism, protesters using time-tested methods of civil disobedience, and more cautious activists who work within the system. Any attempt to dismiss those who challenge free trade and the WTO as misfits and fools—as The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman insists on doing, again and again—will be understood simply to be exhibiting their own ignorance. (Dear Tom: Check out your paper’s lead editorial from Thursday.)

It’s an enormous challenge. Those who say globalism is inevitable, indeed is already here, are right. But that doesn’t mean that the system can’t be fundamentally redesigned. It must be.

As was brought up again and again and again the past week, the WTO, which was supposed to help bring prosperity and justice to the impoverished and to save the global environment from poisoning and over-exploitation, has instead presided over a dramatic worsening of both. If the downward trends continue much longer, disaster looms.

Whether the WTO as presently constituted can be fixed is an open question. We accomplished that this week in Seattle.What is no longer in question is that the organization must change profoundly and quickly or go out of business. The details can wait.

Tom Turner

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