Idealism matters (another anvil that needs to be dropped) · 10:38pm Jul 7th, 2015
I'm a writer, so the only way this post can begin is with a story.
Picture a student, right in his second year of university, looking straight at the world. He's studying journalism, so he needs to be aware of the world's news and how are those delivered. Because of that, he grabs a newspaper to read something. The news don't help. Apparently, sports and celebrities are the only news worth enough space to be explained, while things like high class people avoiding taxes massively and using the dirty money to manipulate a country's politics as their socket puppet are not worth it.
After that, our protagonist can't help but think "are you serious?"
Then, he enters to a class, where the teacher (one of the last ones giving a damn about the difference between teaching and just instructing) ask the people in the room to write about an argumentative discourse about something that ticks them. Our character takes his time, all while everybody around him are basically doing everything but the assignment because, and this is an actual quote, "Why do an effort if with the minimal I get pass. If I don't get anything better out of it, why care?"
With that in mind, I wrote this:
An ideal is not "just a dream"
A trend that has become very common in recent years, is that idealism has been gradually changed with cynicism. It doesn't mater to be free anymore, only personal gain. The ideals are no longer important if they are not popular first. The facts have been replaced with opinions and the truth has become relative. All in the name of reason, because such thing as idealism is not something tangible and, therefore, has no place in reality.
But that's not true. Cultures and whole civilizations have been created under the base of an idea. An entire continent, the American, exists thanks to the ideal that all people are equal, deserve to be free to choose and have a responsibility to do everything necessary to achieve said freedom. That is something that not just one or two people believed back in the day, but thirty-five countries saw it as something that was worth living for, worth fighting for, even worth dying for. And all of that started with a very little idea that was impossible at the time.
Even if the world has changed and rotated in a way that such a thing as an ideal has been reduced to the subjective state of "just a dream", that doesn't mean it's not important anymore. Dreams are important, sometimes we're even saved by them because they give us something to believe in. No matter how many resources or facilities an individual may have, if he doesn't have something to motivate him to do more than just survive, then said individual does little more than a train at full power but without rail over which move forward.
And at the end of the day, if we forget that the day to day is meaningless without a purpose to fulfill, if we start to ignore emotion and reason in regards of conformity, if we don't remember that we are much more than just survival machines, then we won't be more than that; machines operating within a system without the concepts of hell to be feared or a heaven to aspire to.
I can't be the only one believing that, right?
-Superman
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SNYDER! Why can't you put THAT in a movie? Is not that hard and the next SvB's theme would fit like a glove, given what we have seen in the trailers. Please Zack, we all want this to happen. No more "grim and gritty for the dark and edgy" image and more "the ideal hero being a hero".
Indeed.
Hell, people were actually angry that I call myself The Cynical Brony when I tend to be somewhere between a realist and an optimist.
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And that has to be life's ultimate joke on reason; people who call themselves cynic, specially reviewers like the Nostalgia Critic, the guys at Cinemasins, you, the AVGN, etc. are actually some of the most idealistic persons I know about. all while people selling themselves as the brightest of the examples of good behavior are usually those guys at a social justice war tumblrs who, in my opinion and experience, are even worse that the "evil" the fight.
3216930 SJWs are God damn idiots and generally bad people, but very few people will stay above their level, sadly.
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What actually hurts in this situation, is that SJW's believe of themselves and are usually viewed as the good guys. Bullying, harassment, even lying about someone has become acceptable if the target is unpopular enough. Good Lord, even anti-rational moves like "check your privilege" were once praised!
Whenever I meet a cynic who claims to be a "realist", I feel tired. Cynics resort to it because they feel accomplished being the only one who "sees things for the shit it is". They don't think "Wait, really? Maybe I should dig deeper and see if it's as bad as I think it is"; they stop right there because they've found what they were looking for: something to claim their smug intellectual superiority over. As with everyone who ignores the bigger picture, they assume they've figured out everything, know everything, and there isn't more to it.
The problem is that this attitude doesn't help in the least. A guy who argues that "everything is crap and sucks and is worthless" isn't bothering with ideas like "how can we make things better, then?". Because that would require thinking about how things could be better, and that clashes with the cynical outlook. Besides, it's easier to give up than actually try to fix things, because if you try that, you have to work and you might fail. You won't fail if you don't try, after all, and if you can convince others that it can't be fixed anyway, you might look smart for making a wise choice.
Meanwhile, people who actually try to fix things have a chance to get somewhere.
A cynic is man lying face down in a pit and calling you stupid for believing that there's anything good outside that's worth climbing out of the pit for.
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And you know what, that's the point of this blogpost, not only to give a sh*t about it, but to do something.
I want people not only to agree with me, but to do something about it. Even if only one person barely even considers changing his "work for the minimal" I know I did something, which is what I try to do each day. Each time someone I know throws the "no immediate gain, not even try" crap, I lecture him/her on how can we for this generation to do anything useful if we can't even get ourselves to do anything about the minimal.
We can be more, but we need to work for it first.
3216930 3216978 An activist will make plans and petitions to have a handicap ramp put next to a set of stares in front of a library.... A social justice warrior will make plans and petitions to have the stares removed completely as they could "offend" the handicapped.
Wanna hear one of the stupidest cases of this? In California an SJW group decided to have Columbus Day changed to Native American Day since they found "Columbus Day offensive".... Keep in mind this group was made up of black, white, and Latinos, and if they had any Native American in them it'd be so far diluted they can't even lay claim to it anymore. Also keep in mind no one asked them to do this.
THEN when they got that done? They made a new petition to change it to "Indigenous Peoples Day" since Native Americans WEREN'T technically native to America and came from Polynesia and didn't want to offend the islander population...... Again no one asked them to.
Then AGAIN they tried to change it BACK to Columbus Day since the thought they could offend the Italians living in California....................... It's now known as Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples Day in California.
What does this prove? All SJW's? This is there theme
3218784 Please tell me that's an absurdly over the top joke.
Please.
3221547 Sadly? No it's not...... I'd say it only seems insane from a foreigner's perspective but.... Yeah I got nothing this is the most insane thing I've ever heard of too.
