The WTO is coming! The WTO is coming!UP AND DOWN the West Coast, responses varied. The Berkeley-based Ruckus Society The Ruckus Society is an organization that sponsors skill-sharing and direct action training camps for activists from impacted communities working on social justice, human rights and environmental justice. trained in the Northwest woods to perfect acts of civil disobedience civil disobedience, refusal to obey a law or follow a policy believed to be unjust. Practitioners of civil disobediance basing their actions on moral right and usually employ the nonviolent technique of passive resistance in order to bring wider attention to the , including scaling buildings. Anarchists based in Eugene, Ore., packed their black riot clothes and gas masks and planned the takeover of a vacant building near downtown Seattle Downtown is the central business district of Seattle, Washington. It is fairly compact compared to other city centers on the West Coast because of its geographical situation: hemmed in on the north and east by hills, on the west by Elliott Bay, and on the south by reclaimed land . The Seattle Times editorial writers did what any self-respecting opinion staff would do -- tried to get smart. Fast. The more we read, the more people we talked to, the more interested each of us became in what was about to take place in Seattle. This was not a routine event. WTO See World Trade Organization. in Seattle was too big, too hot a story to leave to staff experts on trade. Editorial writers met with trade experts, environmental lawyers, labor leaders, religious leaders, and leftist left·ism also Left·ism n. 1. The ideology of the political left. 2. Belief in or support of the tenets of the political left. left philosophers in an effort to better understand threads of political thought that were about to converge on Seattle. The result was a gang of editorial writers chomping at the bit to write about WTO. For years I have encouraged writers to submit what we call an "editorial notebook," a short, signed piece that runs in the editorial column. It's a way to inject personality into the institutional bloodstream of that venerable space. We led up to WTO week with a series of editorials that set out the key issues and staked out our positions. But when the circus came to town we wanted to be out on the streets taking it all in. Who says an editorial page has to do the same thing day in and day out Adv. 1. day in and day out - without respite; "he plays chess day in and day out" all the time ? Think "notebook," I said. Think short, think personal, think about connecting with readers. I envisioned a sampler of "notebooks" throughout the week. Instead, what readers got was the collection you see on these pages: four short essays that capture scenes as well as issues on opening day of WTO. As the week unfolded, and peaceful protests turned violent, we returned to more traditional formats of opinion -- editorials, staff columns, letters from readers -- about what went wrong in Seattle when WTO came to town. NCEW NCEW National Conference of Editorial Writers member Mindy Cameron, editorial page editor of The Seattle Times, came up with an inventive way to cover the World Trade Organization when it attempted to meet in Seattle in December. |
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