by David D. Horowitz
Fairy tale” often implies naïve idealism: storybook romance, “American Idol” overnight fame, or honorable politicians serving a trusting public.
“Romance” all too often means ambiguity about where one stands with the beloved; fearing another’s clinginess or one’s own unrequited longing; bickering eroding concord; and outright dumping, divorce, and depression. One who dreamed of Cupid discards his or her tinsel valentines. The sweet promise of an “arrow through the heart” frequently comes to seem like one more kick in the gut.
Likewise, the fairy-tale rise to career success does not account for seventy-hour-a-week obsession and stress, office politics and ego battles, or worry about the spouse straying and the kids playing. And in the arts, “success” can mean reading for thirty people at a café rather than for five; selling two thousand copies of one’s new poetry book rather than two hundred copies; showing at a gallery and selling two paintings rather than none, allowing one to pay rent one more month for a studio apartment in a poor neighborhood.
As for politicians, what adult has not suffered outrage and despair over the bribery, deceit, and hypocrisy about sex so common to those professing civic responsibility?
For all this, idealism helps people cope, endure, and strive. Principles and heroes challenge us to aspire, not shrug. Realistic idealism learns love is difficult but possible; work life strains and tests but can enrich materially and spiritually; politics can yield, despite all the corruption, at least approximate justice.
Idealism need not be a fairy tale but principle tempered by tolerance. It can be tears discovering you’ve been robbed, dumped, or fired transmuted into a hilarious anecdote that makes your friends weep with laughter. It can be the spring in your dance step. It can be a line that evolves from circle to square to triangle to rectangle to straight line to circle again. It can be flexibility not capitulating to indifference or amorality. It is the spark, the ember, the lamp that cannot be extinguished even in the harshest storm. Nurture that spark, especially as you learn to recognize better-lit illusions.