Richard Larsen, deputy opinion page editor for the Ventura County Star, had this to say about the internet and its effects on our pro-active/apathetic ventures regarding public involvement for and against the war in Iraq:

"A friend, a few decades younger than I, recently professed a sort of envy that I had lived in interesting times. She referred, of course, to the '60s, that era when possibilities seemed endless and schisms threatened every aspect of society.

I don't think my friend was expressing a wish that things would be more interesting now if we could re-experience the '60s, but I understood what she meant: The times today, though no less interesting, seem less intense. We have the Internet to be grateful or to blame for that.

In the '60s, debate over issues became passionate public roars that echoed across college campuses and street corners and parks. Sometimes, the heated words of debate turned into bloody confrontations.

Today, more debate over issues occurs in online forums, chat rooms and weblogs than in public. It is immediate, nationwide and as intense as the debate in the '60s, especially in connection with the overriding issue of each time: the Vietnam War then, the war in Iraq now.

But, by occurring online, much of the passion people express about the Iraq war does not reverberate with the same urgency and intensity as passions did over the Vietnam War. And that passion needs to surface more openly because the times today are more than interesting, they are deadly serious in the same way the times were when the threat of nuclear annihilation seemed more than a remote possibility.

In 1947, the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists debuted its Doomsday Clock to show how close the world was to nuclear war, midnight being zero hour.

When the clock first appeared, it stood at seven minutes to midnight. It came its closest to midnight, two minutes, in 1953 when, within a span of nine months, thermonuclear devices were tested by the United States and the Soviet Union. It was furthest from midnight, 17 minutes, in 1991. That's when the long-stalled Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union was signed.

Today, the clock is set at seven minutes to midnight and has been there since Feb. 27, 2002, when it was moved closer for reasons that included too little progress on global nuclear disarmament had been made, nuclear weapons materials worldwide were less secure and the United States continued to prefer unilateral action rather than cooperation through international diplomacy. (You can find all the reasons for the time change at http://www.thebulletin.org/media/current.html.)

A song by the Fugs, an irreverent '60s band, always reminded me of the Doomsday Clock. It begins, "Four minutes to 12 and there's a madman at the wheel."

That's always been the fear, that a madman at the wheel will take us on a journey from which there is no return. We don't have a madman at the wheel, but the more we learn about the Bush administration's march to war against Iraq, the more it becomes clear that fanatics are driving our government.

Fanatics do not see the errors of their way. They refuse to adjust plans that do not go as they intended. They steer their course blindly and let neither facts nor reason sway them.

We have begun to see the depth of this fanaticism in information being gleaned by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, the 9/11 commission. We have begun to see how fanatical these leaders are from the books "Against all Enemies," by Richard A. Clarke, former national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection and counterterrorism; and "The Price of Loyalty," for which former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was the main source.

These, of course, have been dismissed as partisan attacks against the president or as the rantings of disgruntled former employees. What can't be dismissed is that the facts, characterizations and observations are of a piece, pointing to a White House of zealots obsessed from Day One with going after Saddam Hussein.

The release Monday of Washington Post reporter and editor Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack" gives us a more detailed and more authoritative view of how President Bush and his key advisers, by their own accounts, turned the war on terror not merely into the war on Iraq, but possibly as a mission driven by a higher authority.

There isn't much people can do much when a madman has the wheel except go along for the ride and hope for the best, as the Iraqis did under Saddam, the Russians did under Joseph Stalin and the Germans did under Adolf Hitler. But we can do something about the fanatics who have come to power. We can vote them out of office and deny them any chance to turn their fanaticism into madness." -Richard Larsen-

The "feel" of today's anti-war movement isn't as fevrent or passionate as I remember the anti-war movement swirling around the Vietnam fiasco. Perhaps I long for the connection of a cause that gripped so many of my generation, eventually rousing us into a collective rage that was finally heard, ending another great tragedy of human kind. Seems that we're on the verge, (or maybe way past the edge), of the next example of human stupidity manifest as resident evil. It might be time to take my voice to the streets, the malls, the soccer fields, the corporate offices, the coffee shops and car dealerships, and start the next revolution of reason and compassion. If the giant mustard plant grows from a single seed the size of a pin head, why can't I start something fine and great by the strength of my will and conviction??? The answer is that I can, we all can, the answer is in the doing...

There are massive "dead zones" in the Earth's oceans as reported by a committee of scientists concerning the health of planet earth. Do you know what happens when the oceans gasp their last breath...We do too. The time is now, because soon we won't be able to live behind the protective curtain of 'out of sight, out of mind' anymore. As gloomy as this all sounds, there is a bright side to all of this. When things are at their very worst, we humans often are at our best! It is never too late to become what we're meant to be...