I’ve joined the Sunnyvale Voices for Peace for a couple of 3rd Friday rallies. We don’t get press coverage, so I don’t know if we are effective. But it helps me feel some self-respect, that I stood up for something in public. I hope it also gives heart to the others.

I try to remind myself “Everything matters! We do not always know what effect we have had.”

In my view, PeacePundit, the biggest obstacle to getting involved politically in the Nazi period was (and still is) that we usually do not have large enough networks connecting people who wish to act responsibly. Advice and dissent that aim at checks and balances have been -in my view- largely missing throughout all social groups (work place, partys, friendships, families). So during Nazi times regime critics were disorganized, and the last resistance had to rely on the inept Graf von Stauffenberg for planting a bomb on Hitler. Compare this with your Kennedy murder, or even the suicide bombers. No one even in Hitler’s immediate vicinity had the stamina to voice his alarm at the misjudgements Hitler fell into. Even Hitler’s closest friend, Albert Speer, saw no way to free Hitler from his neurotic landscapes of reality and joined plans to kill him with poisonous gas through the air conditioning system.

Arthur Solmssen’s novels have as (hidden) subject our (German) inability to join existing networks (unless they are really big and fun), as opposed to the American culture that tries out ways to overcome the threshold (breaking point – I love your list of possible ones). And, most explicitly in “Awakenings”, Oliver Sacks comes up with a psychiatric interpretation of this peculiar kind of inactivity (his term is “Standstill” of the mind), which is formulated in a way to help us get out of this trap.

In Oliver Sacks’s view inactivity in situations that urgently call for activity is a general deficiency of the human mind (due to either a “too much of activity” which we have learnt to suppress or too little activity), most obvious in men and women with Parkinson’s disease:
see footnote 14

Common to Parkinsonian inactivity is “not feeling at home in this world”.

Literature, music, sports, personal contact with other people can efficiently counteract this, according to Sacks. (Judging from my own experience I agree with PeacePundit: demos help forming networks and opinions among the participants, liberating them from inactivity).

Here is an extended quote from Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings, Chapter III. Parkinsonian Space and Time,

“We have seen, again and again, that patients’ own kinetic melodies can be given back to them, albeit briefly, by the use of an appropriate flow of music.
…
The art of ‘handling’ Parkinsonian patients, learned by sensitive nurses and friends – assisting them by the merest intimation or touch, or by a wordless, touchless moving-together, in an intuitive kinetic sympathy of attunement – this is a genuine art, which can be exercised by a man or a horse or a dog, but which can never be simulated by any mechanical feedback; for it is only an ever-changing, melodic, and living play of forces which can recall living beings into their own living being.
Such a subtle, ever-changing play of forces may also be achieved through the use of certain ‘natural’ devices, which intermediate, so to speak, between afflicted patients and the forces of Nature. Thus while severely affected Parkinsonians are particularly dangerous at the controls of motorcars and motorboats

… or in politics, I (Jochen Gruber) would like to add …

(which tend to amplify all their pathological tendencies), they may be able to handle a sailing boat with ease and skill, with an intuitive accuracy and ‘feel’. Here, in effect, man-boat-wind-wave come together in a natural, dynamic union or unison; the man feels at one, at home, with the forces of Nature; his own natural melody is evoked by, attuned to, the harmony of Nature; he ceases to be a patient – passive and pulsive – and is transformed to an agent – active and free.
in your browser window search for “kinetic melody”

Sacks notices that his patients are extremely happy when they are liberated from their inactivity. For many of his Mount Carmel post-encephalitic patients L-Dopa opened the door into an active, happy life (most vividly shown in Penny Marshall’s film “Awakenings” with Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams), but after an initial phase of exaltation most of them were pulled back into their numbness in spite of taking the drug. The desire to live an full life seemed too feable. Exceptions were people who got involved in activities that were self-perpetuating, e.g. work in a job they loved (or, I would add, “active work on political or social issues”).

Contrary to “the cynic”, I experience no frustration during such work as long as I can identify with it. So, at times I need to come up with a new idea or direction of my work and unite that with the work of the group I am in.

In any case, I refuse to be disempowered by this administration. I continue to believe that my opinion matters, if not to George Bush, then certainly to the 70% of the rest of the country that agrees with me. Besides I have to look at myself in the mirror every morning. That would be difficult to do if I did not stand up for my beliefs.

But, later, it took determined and sustained effort for keeping the pressure on to get the political will to stop the war. Many, many of the demonstrations and protests in the early 70′s were a few hundred, not hundreds of thousands. I don’t think it is the numbers of demonstrators, but the directed focus of the work is what we are called on today. And, public protest is a valuable tool to keep the elected pols aware that their constituencies are paying attention. A few thousand votes can make or break an election….and protesters are voters.