Hearing the details on the Iran agreement tonight... makes me ANGRY

[Scootaloo]

75. And let's notice that the Vietnam war kept going.

Your protests didn't stop the war then, just as ours did not stop the Iraq War.

Allow me to excerpt from a book on my shelf...

Civil disobedience is normally a fairly straightforward dance between police and protesters. There are certain rules, such as trespassing, that protesters and police generally agree protesters will break, after which it is just-as-generally agreed that protesters will be arrested, often roughed up a little bit, and then usually given nominal fines. sometimes, as in the case of Plowshares activists, whose courage can never be questioned, the dance becomes surreal. The activists show up at military installations, beat on pieces of military technology with hammers (thus the name; beating weapons into plowshares), and pour their own blood onto the devices in symbolic protest of the blood these weapons shed. They then wait for the military police to show up - or call the police themselves to make sure they show up - get arrested, and sentenced to years and years in prison. other times the dance becomes comical, as when protest organizers provide police with estimates of the numbers of people who have volunteered to be arrested (so police can schedule the right number of paddy wagons) and also provide police with potential arrestee's IDs so the process of arrest will be smooth and easy on everyone involved. it's a great system, guaranteed to make all parties feel good. The police get to feel they've kept the barbarians from the gates, the activists feel good because they've made a stand - I got arrested for what i believe in - and those in power feel good because nothing much has changed.