To tack on to this, a thing my partner taught me: a shortcut to calling someone stupid is calling something they love stupid.
Trying to understand why they like that thing is a more connective and productive path. Maybe at the end of it you end up more informed and still don’t like the thing, but for me often times it turned a knee jerk “that thing is dumb” into a thing I love with people who also love that thing. What a great life hack.
Protests let people at home who are feeling alone in their frustration that there are many more people who feel like them. I also felt like you did until someone framed it that way for me.
A protest isn’t supposed to be a singular event, it’s a series of events that crescendos into a movement—and it’s the crescendo that scares the people in power.