"It’s up to you to speak out against war and in behalf of peace before City Councils, church groups and youth organizations. Try to relate not only the damage done by war to innocent millions overseas but to the cost in your own community in lost lives, lost taxes, lost business, and lost opportunities."

What Can Individuals Do to Oppose Warfare State?

By Sherwood Ross

Americans who voted for peace last November but are getting only more war are becoming increasingly disillusioned.

The majority of Americans, polls show, would slash the military budget by over 30 percent yet President Obama has increased it by four percent. A majority of Americans want U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan but the Pentagon will garrison 50,000 in the former country indefinitely and dispatch perhaps 20,000 more shortly to escalate the war in the latter.

Since voting doesn’t bring the desired change in national policies, people wonder what they can do individually. The answer is quite a lot. “Things have gotten bad enough in the minds of enough Americans that there is an opening for creating a mass movement for real change, and that movement is already growing all around us,” writes citizen/activist David Swanson of Charlottesville, Va., in his new book “Daybreak”(Seven Stories Press). Swanson is cofounder of the anti-war After Downing Street Coalition.

He ticks off a number of examples where grass-roots citizen groups won a round vs. the Establishment:

# In North Dakota, farmers defeated efforts by St. Louis-based Monsanto to sell genetically engineered seeds.

# Threatened by corporate big-box stores, Utah local businesses created a successful “Buy Local First” campaign.

# Hundreds of towns and cities have enacted resolutions against enforcement of unconstitutional provisions of the USA Patriot Act.

learn more ideas of what citizens have done and can do at afterdowningstreet