From this month's editor - Editorial

New Internationalist, Dec, 2001

LIFE must go on. This is the magazine we planned to give you last month, until the Twin Towers crashed and terror of one sort or another started to shake the ground beneath our feet, from America to Afghanistan. These are testing, perplexing times, when only the most enduring of human virtues will remain standing in defiance of the downward spiral of violent hatred and revenge.

Looking back over this issue on Trade Unions, which was conceived and written before the events of 11 September, it is remarkable to me now how little needed changing, how much still applies. The space we are permitted to occupy between the Twin Terrors may have narrowed. But that space had to be created in the first place by the power of human solidarity, on which the international labour movement still relies. It is no easier, or harder, to create it today. No-one ever promised us a rose garden.

Which is not to say that we carry on as if nothing had happened. At various points in this magazine we pick up on some of the issues raised last month in our magazine, Twin Terrors. No doubt we shall continue to do so in future. But though the world may be changed for the worse by headline gestures, by the contest for wealth and power, it is changed for the better by the daily, ceaseless struggle for dignity and compassion by common humanity. That is what this magazine is largely about.

David Ransom

David Ransom for the New Internationalist Co-operative