Our generation’s lack of participation in politics disgusts me. Once there was a time when the youth of America felt pissed off, they marched in the streets and burned their draft cards. But those youths have grown up, and their children have since lost their backbones.

Some vestiges of America’s rebellious spirit still live at the Santa Cruz campus of the University of California, where nearly 70 students occupied an administrative building to protest the astronomical hike in tuition rates. The gesture caught the attention of the national press, but it is unlikely it will do anything to lower the cost of attending college in California.

Does that mean protest efforts are useless? The problem is we have stopped believing we can actually make a difference and influence public policymaking. How far will we allow ourselves to be pushed before we finally make a stand? Will we have to wait for a 32 percent rise in tuition at NAU before students here start seriously questioning the poor decisions of our government?

In American culture, enemies of the establishment are revered as national heroes. The closest thing we have to saints in the United States are people like the traitors who signed the Declaration of Independence and the woman who challenged the idea that she should have to give up her seat to a white man.

No matter how much we agree with the heroic actions those people took in the days of yore, we stop short of taking the next step. We run up against a mental block that prevents us from taking up our forefathers’ causes and their methods of inducing change. What are we afraid of? Do we respect authority more than our forefathers did, or are we simply too self-absorbed and indifferent as a generation to bother shaking things up?

Politicians and bureaucrats will not give us the change we secretly desire, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. If you feel jaded by the president’s lack of initiative and disenfranchised by the Electoral College, then the time has come to find a new way to participate in the political process. You don’t have to settle for voting. Flood your congressional representative with letters, boycott corporations that fund violence in developing countries, or scream at a protest for something you truly believe in.

Civil disobedience needs to live in the hearts and minds of young Americans, not just in dusty history books. Peaceful protests can do a lot more than a ballot, and our free exercise of the First Amendment must remain a powerful tool in the citizen’s arsenal of subversion for the sake of meaningful, lasting change. The time has come to step forward and make our grievances heard.