Every time I hear about protests and think about people standing outside the whitehouse all I can think of is how futile it is. Especially after Occupy Wallstreet where the media did it's hardest to discredit the entire movement.
Occupy Wall Street failed to express any unified goals and demonstrated a lack of understanding of specific reasons why they felt grievance was justified. In many ways it was more of a mob and its message was lost.
But it's also difficult to claim that it does not represent a growing fear and pain felt by a fairly large number of people. An emotional plea if not a logical one. A representative government should have an ear to such things and the fact that it appears not to is about as clear a statement of purpose for OWS as I think history will ever have.
This is often the case with civil unrest of any kind. When a system for representing the needs of citizens fails to do so---whatever the reason---then by the notion that the powers of government are given by its citizenry it becomes important to create a message to show the extent and damage of this failure. There are a lot of ways to do this and people will find the ones that they feel might work. They might fail and pick methods which do not work (riots, e.g., which invite pollution of message, judgement, loss of support, and legitimate reason to oppose) and they might be forced into methods which are poor.
But I fear to live in a place where the government fails to hear these things for too long. Not individuals in government, either, but government.
Voting is not the only tool of civil will. It's supposed to be designed well enough to keep civil will from turning to less constructive tools, though.
Successful protests have leaders are not nearly as organic as they initially appear. OWS participants failed to realize this and instead sat around empathizing with each other.
But if you read analyses of people in it (take for example "The Democracy Project" by Graeber), the goal was direct action. It spawned a lot of organizing to fix problems without begging elites. Nor did they decide to become another Tea Party (flunkies to billionaires/politicians). Once they decided to do that, the state and corporate media decided it was an enemy, not a tool. Hence endlessly repeated talking points about how it "discredited itself".
>But if you read analyses of people in it (take for example "The Democracy Project" by Graeber), the goal was direct action
Of course people that participated are going to claim that action was their goal. However, the fact that they had no experience organizing people (or chose not to organize people through leadership) led them absolutely nowhere.