"I live in D.C and I see at least one protest everyday. Protesting is not effective anymore. I hardly even blink when I see one on my way to work."

I bit my tongue to stop myself from responding, "Well, perhaps this is the problem."

In the year leading up to the current war in Iraq. I was living in Australia. There, I and hundreds of thousands of other people took to the streets in protest of the building momentum towards war. Similar protests took place around the world. Later that same evening as I was watching the news a rolling headline flew past my eyes on the bottom of the screen, with the words, "Thousands protest U.S. entrance into Iraq around the world, but media does not cover." The protests were under reported, but the major corporate television station I was watching did manage to include a meager headline reporting that they were not reporting thousands of people protesting. A month later the war began.

I was born in 1980. I missed the 60's and 70's, often touted as the "golden age" of a politically active citizenry. Now I am 26 years old and realizing that somewhere along the way my generation missed political action class. Perhaps it fell through the public school cracks somewhere between pre-calculus and U.S. History, when we talked for an entire semester about the Civil and Revolutionary wars, and the current state of our own country was never mentioned.

The political action with which my generation is most familiar is point and click. It goes something like this: receive a barrage of "email alerts" in your inbox, follow the link to the pre-written letter to your congress person, enter your email address and click to send. Wash your hands after a hard day of work. You are a political activist and you didn't even leave your house! This is a paltry excuse for action. But you can't say I haven't tried and did I mention I missed the class on political action?

Yet, what else is there to do? There are so many issues and problems, from the war in Iraq, to the war on the environment, to the war on free speech, I cannot keep up. Unless you are a member of the press vigilantly watching over every move that our government makes, both on national and local levels, there is no way for the average citizen to keep up with what is going on behind closed doors in the government hallways of this country.

As far as I understand it the realistic avenues I have to make change in my own country are to vote for two different versions of the same thing during elections (neither of whom represent most of my beliefs), to protest, and to write letters to government officials and cross my fingers that someone might actually read them. Apparently protesting is out.

This being the case, what does it mean to be an American citizen?

My country does not represent me or my beliefs. I have often been ashamed to call it my own. On a trip to Europe I once thought about pretending I was from Canada so as not to embarrass myself, or my traveling companions, by stating my nationality. At the protest I attended in Australia in 2003 I walked the streets of downtown Sydney looking at puppets of the prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, on his hands and knees while George W. Bush, or just "Dubya" as he is known there, rode Howard like a pony. The chants, the signs, the words on people's lips, were in protest not just of a war, but of America itself. I kept my lips sealed for fear that someone might recognize me as a "Yank," and string me up for the hell of it. I might have.

What is left for American citizens who do not agree with the policies of this government on war, on environment, on corporations, on health care? If protesting does not work; if emailing letters into cyberspace is a paltry excuse for political action what is left?

I am writing this because I don't know. Truly I don't. If change is about with a new Democratic congress in action then at least this is a step in the right direction, but did it really need to take this long for the government, and the "American people," to admit that the war in Iraq is a horrible mistake? After all, hundreds of thousands of us have been saying it for almost four years now.

What is it going to take for change to happen? What is it going to take for us all to understand that our government does not represent us, that our media does not represent us, that only we can represent ourselves and that until we do this, I agree protesting is dead in the water.

Paige Doughty is a Master of Science candidate in Environmental Education with Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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