Creative people (like you and me) understand the need from time to time to ask probing “what if” questions. Such questions stimulate our thinking and that provides a lot of new points of view on sticky issues that scientists, academicians, and other curiosity seekers like to ask about. One of my favorites is this: “What would the world look like if….” And then I fill in the blank with the kind of change that is within the realm of the possible. This kind of thinking is also good for the soul. Instead of sitting around fuming and fretting about a problem or issue, it allows me to set about solving it, or at least in conceptualizing a potential solution. It’s also harmless and fun.

Take our number one social disease: Donald Trump. This guy is the “bull in a china shop,” the dufus who needs many more degrees of separation between him and the nuclear codes, and fewer chairs in his organizational game of musical chairs. On the positive side, he is also the best answer to that really dumb loaded question that knuckle draggers love to ask: “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?”

Today the U.S. and the world face the prospect of having to contain Donald for another 43 months. It is a time table that portends so many ups and downs, such a large number of frightening explosions and implosions, and alternate doses of rampant buying and selling, interspersed with the dumbest Tweets ever Tweeted, such that our best supercomputers cannot keep up with how we might deal with all the disasters latent and potential that cogitate under that shiny blonde apparition that sets atop his fat, porky head. For perspective, I digress for a moment to the distant past.

Back in my teaching days for the Department of Defense, a few of my distinguished colleagues would engage in a bit of fun by keeping little books of notes on their more scholarly students. One entry that I recall about one student was this: “This guy doesn’t know anything; he doesn’t even suspect anything.” And so it is with the Donald.

Option #1. What if…we pressured all of Congress to impeach Donald, and thence to toss him out of office unceremoniously onto his fat blubbery butt, never again to darken the halls of Congress or the White House? The probable outcome: He would soon atrophy into a state of blithering bliss where he could be caged and confined to the Penthouse Suite atop his tower of Babel in downtown Manhattan. Meanwhile, we would have a quieter, man of modest stature to implement the most heinous agenda ever conceived by man or beast. What more can be said of those who live to take from the bottom 90 percent and give to the top 10 percent until the last ounce of humanity falls victim to their greed? They have already been incredibly successful. The inheritance laws assure that 98 percent of all wealth stays in the hands of the wealthy now and virtually in perpetuity. The tax code reinforces the inheritance laws. The electoral system, gerrymandering, and voting laws reinforce the status quo while assuring an every increasing Incrementalism toward their goal of an absolute plutocracy. A Mike Pence presidency would lock into place all the greed that is the heart and soul of conservatism. That would mean bliss for them and more hell for us.

Option #2. What if…we kept Donald off balance such that he merely continues to blither and bluster, while he falls victim to himself over and over again? Such a state of confusion would make the Incrementalism noted in Option #1 incredibly difficult to lock into place. It would also buy time for those of us who have enough fight in our bodies and resiliency in our spines to take back our county vote by vote, in precinct by precinct, in state after state, until we have reversed the hellish tide of greed these demons from the deep have thus far amassed.

It isn’t much of a choice to have to choose between stupidity and tyranny, but sometimes the best that we can do is to “keep on keeping on” so that we live to fight the good fight on another day. I never thought I would say it, but it is better to keep Trump as a battering ram against his own party than to let them lock us behind the gates of hell in return for putting one of their worst students in the corner with a dunce’s hat on his overblown head.

We have should have higher priorities like learning how to stop shooting each other; raising our standardized test scores up to world standards; learning how to reduce our obesity rates; lowering our suicide rates, reducing teen pregnancies; becoming energy independent with clean, renewable energy sources; weaning ourselves off the drug habit; creating new well-paying jobs; while memorizing facts like climate change is real, clean air is good, health care helps everyone, and evolution is a fact.