Many highly educated and intelligent people with a pen to write and the talent to weave words creatively, plus the forum to broadcast ideas, like to postulate profound idealized standards that events tracing and chronicling the overall human experience in this world should be looked at and judged against. Thus, these theoretical pundits appear to lustily pontificate from their high moral and ethical perches.
No more wars! No more violence against anybody! Compassion to our enemies! Legalize all illegals and by damn, keep the borders wide open for everybody able to walk in! Turn the other cheek and give money, too! Food for all the hungry! Rich nations should divest themselves so everybody will be at parity! Wealth is evil because poverty exists! Man should be wantonly free as the wind to experience his every whim and capriciousness! After all, the individual is supreme and we cannot go wrong taking that route! Etc., etc.
Then one wakes up and finds we do not live in a perfect world. We have to use imperfect tools, imperfect ideas, and imperfect men to resolve imperfect situations. Call it realistic pragmatism.
But many are still up there in the nimbus clouds with both feet aloft and feel-good harps abuzz. They should all be in heaven, with such profoundly moral/ethical statements and recommendations. Like, right now.
How does one convince people to be pragmatic and realistic with about most anything in this life? And how does one politely but emphatically wake people up to convince them to start with their own backyards, rather than try to quibble and kibitz on the formidable burdens of the rest of the world other than their own?
Idealism and its pursuits can only lead to paralysis, i.e., nothing gets done. And worse, people waste precious time and effort arguing which side has the better and bigger “stick”.
This implacable urge to espouse idealized solutions must act like ambrosia, hyping and bringing its devotees to some kind of self-entitlement. Or maybe, they simply are worshipping before the gods of self-esteem; and why not the gods that foster this-gives-me-the-feeling-of-superiority attitude.
In the meantime, everybody else is a scumbag, worthy of condemnation, derision and contempt.
Nobody wins against that. That’s the royal flush that trumps everything else.
