Do you protest? Armchair or street and does any of it matter?

[Goosebump]

So just no hope. Collectively we are a herd and we all started running when some idiots took off towards the cliff?

Hope springs eternal.  

That's a good description for where we find ourselves.  You could call it momentum, in general.  If we stopped doing thing x...what would that do to everyone's 401k?  If the answer is gut our 401ks...we're not going to do it.  We will, eyes wide open, launch ourselves off the cliff hoping we'll be one of the lucky ones who's wealth cushions their fall.  This doesn't just describe the silliness of our society in general as it rejects change, but it also describes the silliness of many of the movements or people who wish to change that outcome.  We're already committed to the one cliff, and so arguing that we ought to launch ourselves off another is not change, it's the same bad idea.  

All of this plays out in a context where aggressively bad faith negotiators have convinced us that change is our personal and private responsibility.  That we, for example, are the ones accountable for their trash, their pollution, their wages....even as their business model is pollution and labor exploitation and welfare queening for profit.

I'm not sure what your trying to say. "bad faith negotiators have convinced us that change is our personal and private responsibility". Who thinks this? what change, what bad faith negotiators? Your injecting to much personal shit that whatever your trying to tell me is getting lost.