What's a Moratorium?

It's an odd word for a political tactic: it means a time out, a break. It was dreamed up in 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War by people who had tried and failed with Eugene McCarthy's peace candidacy the year before. (Not SDS, we should add). The original notion was a nationwide general strike until the war ended, but that's reaching really far, since people don't stop working just because a small group of organizers ask them to. So the goal was lowered to a general outpouring of anti-war sentiment. It worked.