Though anti-war activism in Gainesville has increased dramatically in the past year, national demonstrations against the ongoing war in Iraq won't attract the same number of participants they once did today on the five-year anniversary of the invasion.
National demonstrations have decreased significantly in past years with protesters beginning to doubt whether their actions are making a difference, said Michael Heaney, a UF assistant professor of political science who recently conducted a study into the demographics and strategies of protestors.
A 2003 anti-war movement that turned out millions of people for the largest international protest in history is now lucky to get 50,000 at a rally, Heaney said.
Protesters in Washington, D.C., chose not to hold their annual march this year, instead organizing about 1,000 people into a number of small groups that performed acts of civil disobedience around the city Wednesday.
They changed their strategy because they had fewer activists and because they hoped that by splitting up they would convey more intensity, Heaney said.
"What's the point of having a large rally if decision makers aren't going to use it to inform their decisions?" he said.
But that resignation doesn't seem to be present at UF, where anti-war demonstrations have increased significantly in the past year.
Heaney said he attributes the increase to the organizations Students for a Democratic Society and Students Taking a Stand Against the War, which were both founded on campus in the past year.
"People who are today in college have a much stronger sense of needing to be involved in politics than people did four years ago," Heaney said.
Today's college sophomores were high school freshmen when the war started, he said, which deeply impacted their developing political ideologies.
Skeet Surrency, a senior and member of SDS, said he thinks the group has been successful in its year of existence and has made activism an accepted part of the UF campus.
But Surrency acknowledged people's frustrations with larger activist organizations and said those feelings stem from more than a lack of change in the country's policy.
Many of the larger organizations are run by small boards of people who make decisions on behalf of the group, making it harder for most individuals to feel involved, Surrency said.
Though still sympathetic to the cause, activists outside of the core group of decision makers feel like they aren't fully participating, he said.
But even if protests do little to change policy, Heaney said, they do serve to change public opinion - and in that anti-war protesters have been successful.
In 2004, 19 percent of voters in Florida's Democratic primary approved of the war in Iraq, according to CNN exit polls. Now, only 9 percent want to keep troops there, according to 2008 polls.
"When we see public opinion has turned against the war, protests have helped to change some people's minds," Heaney said. "Where they haven't made a difference is they haven't changed President Bush's mind."
However, he added, public opinion on the war did influence the 2006 Congressional election, and, in turn, impacted legislation.
But ending the war isn't the only way all activist groups gauge their successes.
Scott Camil, of Gainesville's Veterans for Peace, said the group's goal is to educate the public and remind them of the war.
"Standing out there smelling the fumes of those cars isn't really a healthy thing," he said of the weekly protests the group holds on street corners.
"But it's important for us to maintain a presence, to remind the public there's a war going on," he said.
Camil believes the group is succeeding in helping veterans and discouraging people from joining the military.
But even if the group accomplished nothing, he said, he and others are doing what they believe is right.
"It makes us be able to look in the mirror and know we're doing the right thing," he said.
"When our children and grandchildren ask, 'What did you do to stop the war?' we can say we weren't sitting around with our heads in the sand."
