At this moment in Quebec, Canada, there begins a meeting to create the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. Meanwhile, outside those meetings and in certain other cities of the world, groups of activists are demanding that the suspect FTAA agenda be scrapped, to be replaced by something focused on people's needs rather than the "needs" of the corporate community for profit expansion.

I, meanwhile, have just arrived in the abolished but extant Transkei, former Xhosa homeland of South Africa. I have booked a room in one of the very few lodging places for travelers in this small, bustling city called Umtata, which is the most Black African—and, accordingly, underdeveloped—place I have yet been during my travels. Umtata is the old capital of the Transkei and shows signs of having been controlled by ethnic Xhosa people rather than by whites for generations: a good many of the people I have met can't speak English, though they understand some and many speak Afrikaans. The houses in the surrounding countryside are traditional round thatched huts.

Until now in my South African adventure, I had been unable to shake the feeling that I was in some strange confused suburb of San Francisco—or at least a dreamscape of San Francisco—with the mix of races, languages and mostly-European sensibilities, commerce and architecture. Now that has all subsided, in favor of cows roaming freely across the roads, dirt sidewalks, hawkers with goods I don't recognize, and nary a white face to be seen out and about.

In honor of the latest round of battles against corporate-based "global free trade," I am taking a little time on my travels to think about my work and the bigger picture of my future.

It all started about twelve years ago, when I was talking with a fellow Antiochian, Laurie Thompson, about doing good in the world. I suggested that there are so many great examples of successful human-centered projects that really made a difference in some past place and time, but that we don't manage to accumulate a general knowledge of them. Some of this is by design, of those in that meeting up in Quebec, and some is our peculiar human shortsightedness.

If only we could have better access to those histories, we wouldn't, as a people and as a world, have to reinvent the wheel quite so often—or suffer the same horrific battles over and over.

I suggested that we research and write a book about people "smarter than we are," who have already succeeded at solving some of the things we still and again struggle with. The project stayed just an idea.

Now, I find myself looking out the window of a luxury bus at a rural and unfamiliar landscape, passing through areas where all the assumptions are clearly different but the needs are the same: sustenance, love, self-respect, self-determination, physical safety. As the surreal bus video screen unfolds the disjointed plot of "Mission To Mars," the hillsides of scattered huts mock our awkward culture of entertainment and commerce by their mere survival, by their existence in this world of global pressure to compete.

Coming to this part of South Africa via the country's more Europeanized cities and, before that, Greece, feels to me like the scene in the film "2001: A Space Odyssey," where the HAL 9000 computer was being deprogrammed back to computational infancy. Bit by ritualized bit, the trappings of America were replaced with things less corporate, less controlled, less jaded, less developed—and now have been finally supplanted by maize-patches, huts and cowherders with sticks wandering across gorgeous green, open hillsides of a land never suburbanized.

The "smarter than us" idea comes back to life in this context, with the feeling that the people struggling here have something to offer and something to learn from the efforts I have witnessed elsewhere.

It is not only that the villagers of the Transkei would benefit from understanding of struggles and "advances" elsewhere. In fact, the main help for so many "developing" societies would be in seeing the disasters wrought by pursuit of what they want now.

People the world over who want material wealth and fast-paced technological convenience also have much to learn from this palce. We all need to share experiences. Doing so would ease our impact on the fragile world, even maybe making it possible for those who are so set on profit and convenience to pursue that strange dream without making such a mess.

I don't especially relish encouraging the pursuit of material comfort, but human communities (as opposed to paper communities, invented for the purpose of making profit), if fully informed, could more often be counted on to consider the repercussions of their desires.

That desire for improvement, untainted by a broader want of power over others, could, just maybe, keep human world from imploding.

I 'd like to create some resource, whether it is a book, a Web site, a video, or—probably most effective—a system of communication and trainings, to explore the history of struggle for decent lives across many cultures.

It's a huge task that needs to be refined and narrowed, but it is already being undertaken in various ways, I believe. And I need to find out more about those ways, those people, those histories. I'd like to work together with those people who are already thinking along these lines to build connections between the experiences of the past and the problems of the future. Teaching history needs to be a more grassroots activity, using some innovative techniques to break through the commercial appeal of forgetting history.

For those people who want and believe in material wealth for comfort's sake, or want equal sharing of material wealth (let's call them the Modernist, Progress-Oriented Liberals or the Buckminsterfullerites) they can find ways to be more careful, to be gentler, so that material comfort is not so morally expensive for those who want it in the future as it was in the past. The wealthy societies of the recent past have probably had it the best anyone ever will, though individuals and small groups may always be able to exploit for extreme personal gain—unless it becomes taboo.

And for the people wishing to maintain "undeveloped," traditional, less materially-oriented lifestyles (let's call them the Self-Contained Communities), they can, based on an understanding of the costs, choose from the benefits of medical and other technologies which might benefit them without too much risk of putting the whole world out of balance.

And the people who want power over others (let's generously call them the Insecure Warring Traditionalists), they can meet effective resistance from the first two groups.

And the blokes just wanting to get by (let's call them the People) who don't have a political world view, or an economic analysis, what about them? They can start to discern that their actions do have an important effect and that active participation enhances daily existence in a way never provided by the cycles of employment and unemployment; the cycles of birth…pursuit of private automobile ownership…and death; the cycles of drinking and overcoming hangovers.

The South Africans of Cape Town, of Port Elizabeth, of East London, and the people of all partially industrialized nations, where so many are attempting to imitate America—they need to know the complexity of "first world" stories: the unromantic, struggle-filled, unstable sequence that brought America to its current state, and the painful truth the it's current state isn't so enviable. They need to know that it was no magic; it was no smoother, no less contentious, than the struggle for change in their own societies is turning out to be.

Otherwise they seem to think they can simply name a shop "Hyannisport" or "The French Quarter" and become first world nouveau riche; or they can simply live out the violent words of gangsta rap, as fundamentalists live the words of the Bible, and become first world ghetto materialists; or they can simply build a dam and a factory and become magnate entrepreneurs; or even that they can simply take the reins of power in the name of the people and injustice will run screaming into the sea. Little do they know the long process that each society undergoes to move an incremental step toward anything useful, let alone healthy.

And little do we Americans know of that, though "we" went through it.

People here in Africa dream of America and talk of America constantly, even when they don't know that I'm listening. They appear to have no idea what traumas and conflicts Americans have endured, what battles activists have waged, nor what compromises and sacrifices Americans have made in order to be moderately safe, healthy and materially wealthy, relatively speaking. Our global admirers have little or no access to America's history of struggle and success upon failure, or at least not the real, unHollywoodized stuff.

America is a place where we have everything, or so it is said.

Meanwhile we don't have access to our own history. One of the great American cultural skills is to erase our history as we go—making it look like magic that we got here, as if preordained.

When South Africa, a country in the process of widespread and self-conscious renewal, holds a convention or meeting to solve a problem, chances are good they'll bring in outsiders, sometimes including Americans, to assist. The activists I have met who are more grassroots-oriented—and the movers and shakers among non-corporate business people as well—seem sincerely eager to get my "American" input on issues from AIDS policy to technology planning, even without knowing my credentials.

Being here and being treated as a general resource, policy advisor, and historical interpreter, has hotly rekindled my interest in documenting successes of my own culture's forestrugglers. I have a new sense that people outside America's borders have solved problems that we haven't come close to imagining. Clearly, an exchange of anecdotes between cultures is in order here.

I could never, not with a staff of hundreds, put together a full history encompassing this wide range of issues and historical paths, so I have begun to whittle down an enormous set of possibilities into a wisp of an action plan. Writing about it now, I feel overwhelmed. But maybe if I write enough ideas and group them and cross-examine them, that action plan will again emerge.

I had been thinking of a series of do-it-yourself books or booklets that could be used by communities all over the world, telling short case studies of how people have tried and succeeded (or failed) to impact certain basic problems: unemployment, gender inequality, epidemic disease, pollution, economic revitalization and so on. They would be illustrated, user-friendly, accessible, non-academic workbooks that would function as discussion and deliberation guides for small groups.

The task seems daunting, but not so daunting that it can't be undertaken in some way or other. And imagine what fun it would be researching items to include: success stories against the odds, efforts that brought about the good we have in the world today.



Project update, Dec. 2002: I arranged some small part of the structure and funding for this project, through Antioch College. During the summer of 2002, a diverse and dedicated commission of faculty, staff and students met to develop a plan for an institute to focus on progressive social change. For the moment, while it has a detailed and inspiring framework, the institute has no name. We sometimes refer to it as the Change Institute or the Leadership Institute or some other variant. The official "Publications Plan" of the unfunded institute proposal includes a component inspired by the do-it-yourself workbook idea in the article above. In fact, I have received one $10,000 grant to begin a portion of this work, specifically related to the workbooks. The institute under which they are to be published is still on the drawing boards, mostly for lack of money to hire a director. Nevertheless, the research for my project can begin, and many Antioch students, who go on five "co-op" work-study jobs each, before they graduate, may be interested in helping with this research. Among my extensive other current commitments, I will pursue further funding and collaborators until such time as I may be able to go back out into the research portion of this work myself. I anticipate that to happen sometime late in 2003.

Project update, Jan. 2006: The above Institute never materialized. There is still a possibility that this will still come to pass in some form. Stay tuned.