Activists, Idealists and Fools

There are a lot of causes right now, not just the standard "give to your favorite illness research team or college foundation, but the kind of causes that want more than just money; they want time, they want heart; they want a commitment to come out and march through riot gear and volunteer in countries under police action--frequently from more than one set of policers (?is that word?) and they want people willing to die for their causes.

That sounds amazing, but the activists on the opposing side are frequently called terrorists or criminals or rebels or fools.

Activism has occurred at different times in our nation's history and usually in clumps, with long stretches of time with almost no activity and other times when there are so many activist level causes being heard from,that keeping them straight is tough.

Globally, there has been little time with no activism.  There is a war, a rebellion, a call to action, a call to return to our roots or reclaim our heritage or get fundamental about our religion, somewhere about all the time.  By country, though, I think everyone gets about the same, a period of activism with a calm lull (some places have longer or quieter lulls than others).  Amazingly, we are currently having a lot of countries on the same biorhythmic wave right now.  Maybe that is because the internet is making us all more in-sync, sort of like the dorm where all the women start to share a similar menstrual calender.

While activism is rather cyclic, Idealism is a steadier and more subtle thing.  There are always idealists, and they don't all share the same ideals, but they do tend to share the same heart, a heart in which right and good and better and what it means to be human and what it means to be alive are both definable and hard to actually find in the real world. Idealists are usually thought of as pie-in-the-sky, building sand castles in the air, non-productive, and useless.  But while the Miss America candidate speeches about creating world peace by buying every little girl a barbie is always seen as an idealist, the Ayn Rands, Adolph Hitlers, and Dalai Lamas are also idealists.  They have a view of the ideal world and they were (are) all three pretty effective at working toward their ideals, or getting others on board to work toward their ideals.  Reality is, most of those big religious leaders, and political changers were idealists.  They believed they saw what the world should be like and shared their ideals--whether to the improvement or detriment of the world.

Not everyone is an idealist, though most people can develop an ideal of how the world should be.  Frequently it hits like a little bolt of lightning or the iconic lightbulb over the head.  My own father, a man none to found of reading (he limited himself to books on car repair and animal first aid and the occasional tool use guide, once woke up and decided he had to write a book.  He knew the whole story, got a steno pad from my mother and some pencils, and started writing.  He worked on that for a number of days, made it through most of that pad, then the writing stopped.  He never told us the story.   I have no idea of the story involved an ideal world, but Gestalt is "for real".  Brains and ideas are funny.  Activists don't have to develop the ideal, they are just as likely to work toward someone else's original ideal as their own, but they do need to believe the ideal is, well---ideal.
So, where do the fools come in?  Well, I am an idealist, and have woken up with many ideas about how to improve the world, but I am no activist.  I am more of a nester, or perhaps a hibernator, although certainly not a hoarder---though I take the 3-R's seriously (not those 3 r's, and its A-rithmetic, not rithmetic).  I'm only as active as I have to be; a turtle not a bunny. 

Perhaps I'm one of the fools.