By George Lakey
October 2000

Seattle, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Los Angeles: each of them experiments in mass direct action for justice and environmental sanity. Each has drawn thousands of committed people who care deeply about a better world, for their own back yard and for the planet. Each has involved risk, pain, and suffering, as well as moments of profound connection, creativity, and community. Historians will mark 1999-2000 as a time when the river of change ran more quickly.

Each city's action has also invited controversy and debate about tactics and strategy. In the "morning after" period in which people lick their wounds and organize legal defense against continued state repression, it's easy for resentments to flare and defensiveness to flourish. The challenge is: how to be honest about differences of views, how to allow the authentic debates to happen, and still not lose ourselves in divisiveness?

However much we may need to disagree as we dialogue about our future, two points of unity stand out for most activists:

• the System needs major change, and compared with those who consciously fight us to preserve the unjust status quo, we activists objectively are allies of each other;
  
  
• we will all benefit from a rapid learning curve in which we learn the most possible from each round of struggle and stay flexible and ready to give up what doesn't seem to be working.

In that spirit, I write about some ways to sharpen future mass direct action scenarios. We can fully appreciate the hard work and sacrifice that has gone into each of these recent experiments (and others, such as Windsor, Eugene, Minneapolis) and still act on our freedom to make different choices for next time as we learn more about how to make social change in the twenty-first century. And even though this paper is about the future and uses some of this year's examples, I'll also weave in direct action examples from the past in order to honor our ancestors and to reduce the near-sightedness that comes from only knowing about the activist culture immediately around us.