Why You Should Take Action, And Why The Media Doesn't Want You To

If you ask most people, they'll say that protesting is dumb, that it doesn't make a difference, and even if it does make participants "feel good," it doesn't actually contribute to ending the war.
This is because this mentality has been engrained in them by the media over and over, in order to prevent anything seemingly "sharp."

For instance, as Eric Ruder wrote in his article, "Does It Matter If We Protest?", during the Vietnam war, when between 500,000 and 750,000 anti-war protesters gathered around the whitehouse for a series of rallies and speaches calling to end the war, "[t]he media reported that Richard Nixon paid the protesters no attention whatsoever, and spent the afternoon watching college football. But the true story was different. As history books later revealed, Nixon was frantic about the size of the 1969 mobilizations."

“The demonstrators had been more successful than they realized, pushing Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger away from plans to greatly escalate the war, possibly even to the point of using nuclear weapons, and back toward their ‘Vietnamization’ strategy of propping up the Saigon regime,” author Gerald Nicosia wrote in Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement.

This is just one example when the American public has been lied to through the media in order to stop them from making a difference.

Eric Ruder continues, "In 2007, public opinion against the war on Iraq may run even higher than sentiment against the Vietnam War did in 1970--certainly George Bush’s approval rating is lower than Richard Nixon’s that year. This is encouraging considering the absence of high-profile protests like those of 1970.

"But the tide of antiwar public opinion is having less direct impact on government policy today, and that’s a result of the fact that the sentiment isn’t backed up by any organized expression.

"The problem isn’t that mass protests don’t work, but that today’s antiwar movement hasn’t risen to the challenge of mobilizing antiwar sentiment into mass protests.

It's not that mass protests on their own lead to change, but that they are a starting point for a movement that can make a difference. For instance, the massive Vietnam protests inspired the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War to get back into action, and allowed the vets to join in solidarity against what they all knew was evil, but didn't think there was any point in fighting alone.

Ruder explains that "[t]he Vietnamese resistance kept the U.S. from imposing its will, but couldn’t expel the U.S. on its own. The rise of resistance among U.S. soldiers undermined the effectiveness of the U.S. military as a fighting force, but GI organizing didn’t happen in a vacuum. The antiwar movement in the U.S. shook up American society, but it didn’t have the power to stop the war machine.

However, "[t]ogether, these three forces combined to compel the U.S. ruling establishment to conclude that only further ruin of its military and turmoil within U.S. society would result from continuing the war on Vietnam. So national antiwar mobilizations are a necessary part of a movement that can end the war, even if they don’t have a direct impact on war policy themselves."

"A large national protest that attracts new as well as experienced activists helps people in the antiwar movement overcome feelings of isolation they may experience in their own cities and towns. It also strengthens local organizations that mobilize for the protest--and these groups in turn benefit from the politicization of individuals who return home invigorated to continue the struggle. And of course, the larger such mobilizations, the greater the impact they can have on shaping mass public opinion.

"This last point is one of the most important ways that a strong civilian antiwar movement can assist in the development of GI resistance--another crucial ingredient in the antiwar struggle... During the Vietnam era, the peak of the GI revolt followed years of domestic protest, the growing radicalization of the student antiwar movement and the obvious futility of the war effort itself in the face of the Vietnamese resistance."