You know, if it didn’t involve bundling up and venturing out into public streets, and holding some hand-scribbled placard up for hours on end — and then possibly running headlong into a bunch of wild-eyed, deaf, screaming lunatics in red hats — I would totally be into protest. I mean, I have a conscience. I object.

But, yeah, here’s the problem: Resistance takes effort. It takes sacrifice. Some conviction. If we all (w’all?) could launch our protests from the comfort of our own homes … well, w’all’d be bloggers. And what good’s that?

A couple years back, disgusted with the current state of U.S. politics and the a-hole in the Oval Office (excuse the extra-long parenthetical aside: my biggest beef with the guy in that un-cubicle is that he is defiantly dumb; clearly and purposely clueless on a multitude of topics but too stupid to learn or admit to what he doesn’t know, which leads to laziness and lying and various other sins and inanities), I took the bold step of sending a few bucks to the liberal action group moveon.org.  In return, the good folks at moveon sent me some stickers with the word “RESIST” on them. Excitedly, and with a degree of uneasiness (I live in a really red state), I slapped one on my car.

And … that’s as far as I’ve gone in the bold protest department.

Dang. Maybe it’s not resistance that’s so hard. Maybe it’s that inertia thing.

Well, now 2020 is here, and the dumbass is still in the Oval Office and dumber than ever. By sheer force of bloviation — because, this can’t be said enough, it ain’t through smarts — and aided by a kowtowing party that he has used as a footstool, this dummy has castrated Congress and the checks and balances laid out in the Constitution; he’s smothered a supposedly neutral Justice Department into doing his political dirty work; and he’s stacked the courts, thanks to a supremely spineless Senate, for decades to come.

He’s also, not for nothing, brought us to the precipice of war, alienated our allies, befriended enemies, endangered the environment in a multitude of ways, done his best to poison the people against the press, and (arguably worst of all, yet another result of his pure dumbness) whined and bitched and insulted and threatened and name-called everyone who opposes him so relentlessly that he has nearly cleaved a badly fractured nation in two.

He is the un-uniter. He is the Divider in Chief.

If that isn’t something that’ll push you into the streets to take on Dopey and his mindless red-hatted dwarfs, what will?

And yet … and yet …

I thought, long ago (almost four years ago), that what the people of this country have built over the past couple centuries is way too solid for someone like Trump to bring down. I thought us largely immune to his whims, or to the whims of any given politician. But this dumb SOB is proving me wrong. And now his tough guy act — it befuddles me that anyone is afraid of a guy who dodged the draft, never picked up a hammer in his life, has the physical characteristics of the Sta Puft Man, and says that he has “a very good brain, and I’ve said a lot of things” — has filtered down to the state and local level to the point that wannabe Trumps are now littering every red state in the union. It’s a parade of fools.

Doesn’t that make you want to hit the streets?

Yet here we sit.

Giving up, rolling over, chilling out, just trying to go on with your life — that’s all very understandable. Resistance, we’ve now established, is difficult. It may well be futile.

But that kind of thinking is exactly what Trump and his followers are counting on. That’s his lame game. We all know that by now. We sure should. He’s like some dastardly superbug, infecting us and wearing us down until we’re just too sick and tired to give a damn anymore.

This, though, is serious. I worry now, unlike long ago, what Trump and Trumpism is doing to this country. I worry that more Trump will mean an even more divided America, if that’s possible. That more Trump will lead us further down the road to environmental Armageddon. That more from this utterly classless, utterly clueless fellow with the “very good brain” will wreck the economy (which, come on and admit it already, has been blossoming for many more years than he’s been in charge).

I worry that all his lies will become commonplace among that parade of foolish politicians following in his wake. I worry that all that lying will be accepted without objection by a tired, resistance-less people.

But do I worry enough to pull myself out of my BarcaLounger? To do something more than hand over a few bucks to a worthy cause or slap a sticker on my bumper, or to rail for a few hundred words on a blog?

What will push us off our collective keisters? What will it take until we start to fight back in a meaningful, non-bloggy way?

Yes, yes, yes. Resistance is hard. But what happens when we don’t resist?