No one should doubt the determination of the “Bangor Eleven,” the anti-war activists who staged a sit down last September in Sen. Olympia Snowe’s Bangor office. The last six of the group now have chosen 24 hours in jail instead of a $200 fine.

But is Sen. Snowe the right target? Can civil disobedience influence the Bush administration’s conduct of the Iraq war?

Sen. Snowe has a long record of resisting pressure on issues and following her own convictions. For instance, she has spoken out against President Bush’s escalation of troop deployment, as have the rest of Maine’s congressional delegation.

But what is an individual to do, if he or she is among the growing majority who see the war as a mistaken venture that has little or no prospect of a satisfactory end? It is hard to think of useful actions like the heroic civil disobedience demonstrations by Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela or the lunch-counter sit-ins that desegregated restaurants or the refusal of Rosa Parks to take a back seat on the bus. Vigils by a few hundred peace activists may cause some passing motorists to honk their horns in agreement, but such tactics amount to only a pale shadow of the thousands who marched in the ’60s and ’70s to force an end of the Vietnam war. (In that era, the military draft was a powerful motivator, although the young demonstrators hated to admit it.)

This war is a different sort of abuse, with no clear solution. Escalation, withdrawal and “staying the course” all seem headed for disastrous consequences. And many thousands of young Americans are risking their lives and their futures in Iraq.

Yet there is, indeed, something that individual Americans can do to affect the outcome. In fact, they have already started it, in the remarkable electoral revolt in last November’s midterm elections. Both the losers and the winners seemed stunned by the many unexpected defeats of well-established senators and representatives.

It was clearly a case of the people getting far ahead of their leaders. The country may have been slow to see the mistakes, deceptions and mismanagement in the Iraq war, but when the tipping point came, the people were ahead of the politicians, the press and the entire public establishment.

Now that’s a demonstration of how the citizens of a free country with a free vote can help correct mistakes and begin to chart a better future.