There are a myriad amount of ways for the general public to protest against those actions so taken or encouraged by the government or of private enterprise that the protestors do not approve of, or that they see as being detrimental to the people, in whole. In regards to those avenues of protest, as might be expected, there is a rather big dividing line between physical protests so made that have a strong tendency to lend itself to adverse actions being taken by that government or of private enterprise which thereby can lead to violence so being enacted against the protestors which can often escalate into mayhem; as compared to those non-violent protestations, which are far more civil in structure and if there is violence, it will be enacted only by those that are representatives of that government or of private enterprise but never by those so protesting.
The main issue with any physical protest in which the protestors are antagonistic in nature, is that this can easily lead to events degenerating into a showdown, between those two parties, in which one of those parties is typically quite prepared to do battle knowing that they have governmental or private enterprise auspices backstopping their actions. On the other hand, peaceful protestors that have been trained in a manner in which they will not ever be the aggressor against those that they are protesting against, and of which, the abiding point of their protest is to have their say and to try to take to task the error of the other entity, so as to possibly effect change, or at least at a minimum, to raise awareness of what the dispute issue is all about, is the type of alternative path that might well be able to appeal eventually to the better angels of the opposition’s nature.
Additionally, when it comes to protesting, one of the alternative pathways to achieve change, is to create a protest that will impact in a negative way, the economics of a given business or of a governmental enterprise. In other words, when businesses or governments hear only whining from the general public, but never have to suffer from a specific boycott against a given target, then to a large degree they probably aren’t going to make any of the changes so desired by the protestors. On the other hand, any protest, that impacts the bottom line of a business enterprise, will for a certainty, get some sort of response, and if that boycott stays the course, will probably effect a positive change.
So too, just because a government states that the general public must do a certain something, does not mean that it must so be done; for if there are enough people within the general public that will not participate into being coerced into that which they do not approve of, believing that they as citizens, have unalienable rights, which supersede a misdirected given government directive and further that they are willing to pay the price for that civil disobedience, then that is their prerogative.
Governments and businesses have a strong desire, whether they are in the right or in the wrong, for their citizens to simply obey them; but not every directive so made by that respective entity is necessarily moral or right; of which, the best response by those that do not agree with such, is to collectively and to peacefully not to consent to that which they don’t agree with through a systematic and dedicated manner with the sure knowledge that by always maintaining the moral high ground that this choice is the correct one.