"Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?"-E. Hemingway

Indeed it would be. We live in a world dominated by dissapointments both in the present and in history, and I think we've become so used to it that we don't strive for higher ideals enough anymore. The gap between the beauty of humanity's dreams and the ugliness of its realities is the greatest tragedy of our species, but I think its also valuable to note that its only by dreaming these wonderful dreams that we got this far in the first place. Martin Luther King's ideal of a nation that is colorblind and without racism has never been accomplished, but it was by dreaming that dream that he helped bring us so far along on that path toward achieving his goals. John Lennon's wildly optimistic dream in "Imagine" probably will never be realized, but the very fact that the standard exists and is expressed so beautifully gives us a thing to strive for when we need the courage to do the right thing.

I feel we need some of those very same dreamers again. This country is long on hedonism, real-politik, and cynicism. The only way for us to achieve peace is to strike out at our enemies in perpetual warfare. The only way for us to achieve a better society is by reverting to the hard moral standards of many years ago. The only way for us to win (elections, sucess...debate rounds =P) is by sacrificing our principles. We can never expect love, only sex. We can never expect improvement, only survival. We have become lost in the inevitiable doom of our own pessimism. We have lost the rash unrealistic optimism that made us great.

When I look at the worlds spoken and the dreams dreamed by people like Bobby Kennedy, Teddy Roosevelt, John Lennon, and Martin Luther King. I can't help but want to bring them to this time and place, to tell people what they could be capabable of, and what things SHOULD be like. These people accomplished great things because they were dreamers. The pragmatists belong in the dustbin of history; they only knew how to succeed in an imperfect world. It is the dreamers who let us imagine that we could be the people we always hoped we would be, and who give us the strength to push for a more perfect world.