Here's how you think the revolution is going to work if you're a nut job of the left or the right.

The members of your booga-booga movement will go out in the street and fire guns/sling rocks at the government.

The government will run away.

After that, the government will hand you your wildest dreams. Free abortions on demand for 13-year-olds. Free guns. You'll be able to call your non-white co-workers any vile thing you want. Gay marriage will be mandatory. Everyone will be forced to become a Christian.

And, of course, your age or physical condition will not hamper your ability to fight and win a revolution. If you weigh 124 pounds, you're getting a degree in gender studies, and you've never been in a fist fight, you'll be able to win the revolution by throwing rocks and wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt. If you're 40 years old, you're 30 pounds overweight, your last fist fight was against a guy who was drunker than you were, and you take a drug for high blood pressure, you'll fire one burst from your AR-15, and the revolution, she is won!

Doesn't work that way.

Instead, a real revolution sometimes lasts for more than a decade. So do civil wars. It takes the government a while to collapse, but, before they do, they butcher thousands of people.

First, the electricity and water get cut to a couple hours a day. Trucks no longer deliver your blood pressure medication to the drug store, which has been burned down, anyway. There is no voting. There are no more Che Guevara T-shirts. You wear whatever clothing is shipped to you by charitable organizations in Norway.

Armies on both sides are made up of young, demented fanatics, or by child soldiers loaded on crystal meth. They burn your house down. They rape your wife. They rape your husband. They rape your 3-year-old daughter. There are no jobs and no unemployment checks. Everything is dead, dying or on fire.

That's a revolution. That's a civil war.

In the city where I live, we have numerous Syrian people who fled the civil war in that country, which has been going on since 2011. They're refugees, runners from horror, footloose in a new country, and they're settling in just fine, except for the nostalgia, the night terrors, and the memories of relatives shot on some disputed street in Aleppo.

They buy a business as soon as they can, sometimes several members of a family going in on a gas station. I knew two brothers who ran a 24 hours a day, seven days a week gas station. They pumped it for you, too, and each brother worked a 12-hour shift every day so as to avoid having to pay anyone.

What did Syria lose when they lost those two men, hard-working fellows who built a business with bleary eyes and the constant, dull headache of the overworked? I've had that headache, but I've never had it for 10 years.

So, dream your dreams of video game revolution, where you can always pause the action and go get some more queso dip.

Doesn't work that way.

If you pause your game long enough to tuck your 6-year-old into bed tonight, ask yourself what the revolution will be like for her. She's a smart kid. She likes to draw. You work construction, but you've already decided she'll go to college, maybe art school. Kiss her, and pray the revolution is like a video game, so you can EXIT GAME before the soldiers drag her out into the yard.

My Scots-Irish grandmother used to say, "What you call comes to you," and things better not work that way.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, "Devil's Elbow: Dancing in the Ashes of America," is a collection of his best columns. It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle and iBooks.

Photo credit: DUrban at Pixabay