Hale Woodruff's Amistad murals belong to Talladega College. The image is linked to the excellent site of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

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A fellow comes along claiming to be a doctor. "I'm the world's most powerful doctor, and I'm going to eradicate bubonic plague from the world. I'm going to do it with my fabulous high-tech anti-bubonic plague cream. This is the most powerful plague cream in the world. It wipes out bubonic plague sores on contact. And, I have the most accurate delivery systems in the history of medicine. With my satellite-guided plague cream guns I can precisely target individual sores from across a room and hit them with 90% accuracy." Since you're a lot smarter than this idiot you'd realize he doesn't know the difference between symptom and disease. His plague cream may indeed eradicate individual sores, but the disease is the microscopic organisms which live in the patient's blood stream. Wipe out one sore, more will appear elsewhere. Treat the disease the wrong way and you'll kill the patient.

Bush and his wars are like this doctor. Bush drops bombs on symptoms without a thought for their cause. By doing this he's strengthened terrorism, made America less safe, made the world more dangerous. His wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are worse than failures: he's on his way to killing the patient. He's killed more innocent Afghani civilians than the Americans who died on 9/11, to impose a puppet government which is already under attack by its own people. He's killed so many Iraqis that his government refuses to release the number. Nice going. Smart doctor.

Want to fight terrorism? Attack the disease, not the symptoms. Here's how. 1) End the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 2) Broker a just and lasting peace between Israel and Palestine, where "just" and "lasting" mean recognized as such by both sides. 3) Withdraw support from the antidemocratic regimes in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan and elsewhere throughout the Islamic world. 4) Invest in a strategic "Marshall Plan" of massive aid and technical assistance to end the endemic poverty from which terrorism arises. 5) Mobilize American industry and technology to eliminate strategic dependence on fossil fuels, as NASA mobilized to reach the moon.

I've been active for 37 years in the grassroots movements for peace and social justice. Nowadays I'm trying hard to figure-out the best ways to contribute at this time in my life. I'm dissatisfied with the organizational approaches which the traditional left and progressive movements have employed for so long. I'd like to work out a new approach based on what I'm good at, what interests me, and what unique contributions I might be able to offer. The Web is central. If we embrace its possibilities we can use it to improve the ways in which we accomplish our activist work. Our projects and organizations can become more efficient, more nimble, more effective, and more fun.

The project through which I help to explore these ideas is Trouble Tickets. We're a network of friends who contribute their professional talents and interests in ways which make sense for each of us personally. The Trouble Tickets Web site is our collective focus right now. Some of us contribute Web design and development expertise, while others contribute their experience managing nonprofits. Others contribute their analytical and theoretical skills. We organize our work via the Internet, with few face-to-face meetings.

To my knowledge, Trouble-Tickets was the first activist group in the U.S. to predict the invasion of Iraq; the first to use the word "incompetent" to describe the Bush administration's foreign policy; the first to point out the failure of the adventures in both Iraq and Afghanistan; and the first to suggest concrete strategic alternatives which are now increasingly widely accepted.

Right now the project is on hold, as life seems to have other purposes for us. Who knows? Maybe we did some good.