Do you vote in a regular, informed, and occasionally aggressive way? Then you are enough of an activist to help bring about meaningful change :-)
I more or less restrain myself to watching after my own neighborhood
If more people would watch their own street as you do instead of Oprah, Montel and Jerry Springer, we could probably eliminate a dramatic percentage of the problems and ills of society.
Where I live, crime truly does not pay.
I've always felt that Police, strict-Constitutionalist judges and prisons were all excellent uses of tax monies
:-)
This FR thread from 2007 may be of interest
Inside America's toughest jail (Brit paper says Sheriff Joe Arpaio's ideas would be great for U.K.)
If everybody would tend to their local problems there would be, in my opinion, far fewer regional ones.
Social ills are frequently similar to cancers....if they are allowed to metastasize, they become a far greater and sometimes an insurmountable problem.