Disposable Culture

If a person threatens a hunger strike, really it is an appeal to their opponents sense of "value of life." They are assuming that people will see that life is more valuable than whatever practice they are continuing/protecting. Similarly, if a people pour wine out, burn books, or pour tea into a harbor...they are making a similar point; appealing to a persons sense of "waste" and/or that the people protesting are willing to invest even more into destroying a practice/product than the cost of having it.

This works, only when people VALUE things...when they have a deeper understanding of the relationship between things/ideas and the efficiencies won or lost in the exchange of said things/ideas. However, we live in a "disposable" age...an age of single-use plastic, of stagnating wages, of leaders who happily torture and kill publicly (or would like to if allowed)... an age where we value virtually nothing and cater only to self-interest.

The key to solving this is public UNDERSTANDING, if one understands more, they can value more/appropriately.

Example: Your determination of the value of life becomes more accurate when you understand how difficult it is to "live" in the universe, how precarious and tied to the environment it is, the difference between a life of misery and a life of flourishing...when you really understand life, you can value life appropriately.

Bottom line, protesting means nothing if society values nothing...
Nobody can vote on action unless we agree on reality and the value of things in that reality...
The beginning of every change and solution is building our UNDERSTANDING.

War

"War... War never changes.
Since the dawn of humankind, when our ancestors first discovered the killing power of rock and bone, blood has been spilled in the name of everything: from God, to justice, to simple, psychotic rage.
In the year 2077, after millennia of armed conflict, the destructive nature of man could sustain itself no longer. The world was plunged into an abyss of nuclear fire and radiation.
But it was not, as some had predicted, the end of the world. Instead, the apocalypse was simply the prologue to another bloody chapter of human history.
For man had succeeded in destroying the world... but war... war never changes." 

- Opening Cinematic from Fallout 3

There is no winner in war. Everyone believes they are the hero in their story and will backwards justify any outcome...but in reality, we always lose precious progress on the whole. We must eliminate war from existence.
Although Eisenhower was involved in creating the Military Industrial Complex, he recognized his folly and later said:

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."