Well, I am an activist, and am more of an activist as I get older than I ever was in my teens and twenties. But it is ironically more and more difficult to keep going. You do come to think that it is pointless, or that you do it just to keep the bastards from having it all their way. The problem I think is that most activists of a non-right persuasion used to have a fairly straightforward but foggy idea that some large good result was coming, and that their little piece of it was contributing. The only people with that kind of ideology anymore are free-marketers, who see any and all forms of compassion as wrong-headed interference with a system that is working to achieve universal wealth at some time in the distant future. They have an explanation, a plan, and are doing very well out of it. The rest of us are left with the "little piece" -- the ordinary good, the local struggles, the occasional victory. These do not add up to a larger goal, unless you are religious, or have some singular cause you are working for. This kind of work is immensely valuable, and can be more than enough for some people, but it can also be terribly lonely and confusing, and you can eventually feel that you are wasting your poky little time while the big world goes to hell. What heroes do is to show you that the good life can be lived in the larger realm -- they are embodiments of a larger vision (which is what often makes them dangerous). I think it is that larger vision people lack, not heroes. We have become frightened of larger visions, because of the horrible damage some of them have done this century. Communism's worst crime was to poison the belief that having dreams of social justice on a large scale was good, and to waste everyone's energy on that stupid version of it for so long.

Still, without vision, the people perish.... The dreams will come back, different, better, smarter. They are coming back in one or two of my students, who start from a deep ironic suspicion of crap, and yet they are stirring down there. Or at least graying professors like to think so. It ain't over yet.

yours, Peter T.