Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle?
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
-The US Constitution
I've never seen active protest as a frivolous thing. If it was, the framers of our Constitution wouldn't have placed it so high among the Amendments. They wouldn't have taken the time and care to make sure we're assured the right to do it. If it really was frivolous, civil rights protestors wouldn't have marched in Selma, or Montgomery, or Washington. They wouldn't have held sit-ins in Greensboro or Richmond or Atlanta. Ten THOUSAND people wouldn't have marched on the nation's Capitol to show their shock and horror at the shootings at Kent State. The Brown family wouldn't have risked all they could've lost just so their daughter - and the sons and daughters of every other African-American in this country - could go to the school around the corner instead of being shipped off to another one that was more "appropriate."
Change doesn't come because we wish for it to. It doesn't come because we hold our heads high and walk through our lives living them well. Change happens because someone has the strength and courage to stand up and say "this is wrong; we can't do this anymore."
Where would we be, as a nation, if Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and Benjamin Franklin hadn't taken up the pen, fully aware that every word they wrote was their own death sentence? Where would we be, as a nation, if Patrick Henry hadn't stood up and said "Give me liberty or give me death"? Where would we be, as a nation, if Alice Paul and others like her hadn't been willing to stand on frozen sidewalks in the wind and the rain while people hurled insults or rocks or fists, hadn't been willing to indure humiliation and torture, not just for their own right to walk into a voting booth and place a checkmark on a ballot, but so that EVERY woman had the right to do so?
Where would we be if Martin Luther King, Jr. had decided it was enough to lead by example?
If our forefathers taught us nothing else, it was this simple principle: that equality and freedom are worth fighting for; that the only way to hold onto those rights when someone else is trying to deny you them is to FIGHT for them. We're lucky that we live in a country where we don't have to take up the musket and bayonet anymore to wage that battle. Adams and Jefferson and Washington and Henry and Paine risked everything so that, hopefully, the only weapon the future generations of Americans would have to wield in defense of their rights would be their voice. Paul and King and so many countless others took hold of that weapon and refused to lower it until their fight was done.
And we dishonor their struggle any time we sit idly by and refuse to wield it ourselves.