I was in downtown Toronto on February 15, 2003, freezing my ass off in a protest march of nearly 100,000 people who were, in turn, part of a global march of between 10 and 20 million people protesting the invasion of Iraq. It was the single biggest protest in history, and it was against a war that hadn't even started yet.
Popular protest against the Vietnam War didn't take off until the war had been grinding for several years.
Sorry if this is rubbing salt in a wound... but, that protest really didn't have any effect. Did it? I agree with Maddox here that both protests (while impressively sizable and passionate) were equally ineffective.
It's an open (and probably unanswerable) question whether the invasion would have gone differently if not for all the popular global protest (though I can imagine that the US would have been less restrained if they knew the world wasn't watching).
I was responding to the OP's contention that the Boomer generation was more committed to protesting in support of social justice than people are these days.
I remember that date, being in New York myself. Seeing the police embrace their militaristic fantasy of being under attack; seeing the futility of organized dissent when it came to changing the course of an autonomous government. That was my last protest. "Cypherpunks write code".
Yes I remember that massive worldwide protest against the impending invasion of Iraq. But the US was still able to get 20+ countries to go with them into war. Based on the "get off your ass and actually do something" theory of the OP, why didn't this have any effect?
Popular protest against the Vietnam War didn't take off until the war had been grinding for several years.