Of course your opinions count. Individual opinions always count; that is how they are translated into masses. I watched, as, I suspect, did you, a huge group of unarmed civilians march on an armed palace in Romania, tell the soldiers, "You don't want to do this, you want to help us," and force a dictator to step down on the basis of their word alone.

The private citizen has responsibility on every subject to run through a series of questions: "Does this matter to me enough to hold a serious opinion?" "What are the facts I need in order to form a serious opinion?" "What *is* my opinion?" "Do I care about it enough to try to take action on my opinion?" "What action should I take?" "How will this action interrelate with other opinions I hold?" "If they conflict, which one should I follow?"

The fact that most of these questions usually end up with the result of doing nothing doesn't mean they need not be asked, at least nonverbally, if only for the sake of needing to identify the few cases where action *is* necessary. And I don't restrict that to the citizens of a democracy, either -- the Romanians weren't. It's both right and duty of anyone with the wits to grasp that there has *never* been a government which could exist without the consent of the governed, for some sufficiently valiant definition of 'nonconsent'.