Vivat Libertas

A big part of all this activism and freedom-fighting is hopelessness, strangely enough. On the one hand, you have the righteous and upstanding pillars of society (read: sheeple) claiming that "protest never changes anything" ( I debunked this a couple of days ago ), and on the other hand you have the ones who fight the good fight...well, they don't give up, but at some point every activist is going to sigh and wonder why they got themselves into this in the first place, why they waste their time trying to convince people who will never listen of a cause which many think is little more than a pipe dream. If you're an activist and that hasn't happened to you yet, it will. I want to concentrate on the second manifestation of hopelessness today, since I've dealt a little with the first one already. I'm no blithe optimist, no ignorant idealist, and I don't believe flat-out denying problems makes them go away. I know how hard it is to convince people; I kn...

No, this isn't the Catullus poem, beautiful as that is. This is actually about the struggle between idealism and cynicism, told mainly from the idealist point of view. I am very, very idealistic. Perhaps I should be ashamed to admit that - after all, idealists always walk around with their head in the clouds, don't they? Aren't they childish with their refusal to accept the harsh realities of life and their unrelenting stubbornness? An important part of being an adult is laying aside childish dreams; perhaps ideals are just another one of those. Besides, when have idealists ever gotten anything done? The world doesn't work that way. It will never  work that way, because people are too stupid and cruel to make it work, because following your conscience would bring economic ruin, because idealists are somewhere between crazy and batshit insane... ...I'm not ashamed to admit it, strangely enough, since the only people who have ever gotten anything done have been t...