Friday, February 8, 2008

My Other Point

I have a friend who is ultra-conservative politically, and one day when we were talking he told me that the difference between conservatives and liberals are that conservatives are realists, while liberals are idealists: liberals want to enact plans that would work in an ideal world, while conservatives see that they would fail in the real world and act accordingly.

I'm pretty moderate. Socially more liberal, I guess. I blame college. Haha. Though according to my friend, blaming others and not taking responsibility is also a liberal attitude...but anyway, my point is, I decided today that I was totally designed for utopia. Or a vacuum.

In 20th Century American Foreign Politics today, the topic was liberal internationalism. We talked a lot about World War I, Woodrow Wilson, the Bolsheviks' October revolution, and the rise of Lenin. We spent a lot of time on Wilson's Fourteen Points, reviewing each of them, why we thought he thought they would lead to a perfectly peaceful world, and why Lenin shot them down. Most people said that they thought that the Fourteen Points weren't bad - just not realistic. In a perfect world, they would work - they worked on paper; just, they probably wouldn't in practice.

Some people are incredibly well equipped to succeed in the real world. They have the kind of mindset it takes to survive in the competitive society we live in. They're positive yet realistic; cynical yet happy. Then there are the people like me who were just made to live in a perfect world. The idealists who are capable of accepting the Way Things Are, and who can survive perfectly well in the real world - they're just forever frustrated that the Way Things Are isn't the Way Things Should Be.

That was fairly simple and kind of banal but oh well.

And now the marvelous Chris Ayer:
I don't mind being alone
I don't mind seeing that I'm here on my own
It's the choice that I've chosen
And maybe we're all opening our eyes
To wisemen inside
Who give answers to questions
And make life a lesson
In hoping to the point of denial...

I don't mind being scared
Don't mind seeing that I'm under-prepared
For the life that I've chosen
And the way that it's going
Shows that I ought to give into my thoughts
The philosopher's prayer
Please show me I'm here
So I can be okay to go

All the way to the earth from the sky
Newly made today so I sink when I fly
It's in the way that I walk crooked lines
Gaining strength all the time
And by the ocean I'm told that we'll all be the same
A thousand pieces of an ocean, arriving and changing
We'll wait for the day when we'll evaporate

Evaporate...
We'll change...
Someday.

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Now playing: Chris Ayer - Evaporate

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