""Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,"" said Lewis Carroll's White Queen in ""Alice Through the Looking Glass."" I increasingly find the White Queen's belief in the impossible may be exactly what Americans need. Dream the impossible dream, as Don Quixote would say, and you just might realize it.
Unfortunately, safely ensconced as we are in TV shows and TV dinners, coddled by a media that lulls us into the comfort of cynicism and helplessness, it is easy to dismiss the troubles of the rest of the Earth as impossible predicaments and return to watching ""Family Guy.""
Our world abounds with problems. Even though there always seems to be someone stepping forward with one sort of proposed solution or another, the majority of the most grievous issues remain unsolved and festering. An obvious example is the Iraq War, which at this point everyone but the exceedingly delusional ought to acknowledge as a major concern.
Whether you want to call it a civil war, contested occupation or just giddy and chaotic slaughter, it is unfortunately one of those situations more and more people simply accept as unworkable (on both sides of the political spectrum.)
Add in the genocide-in-progress in Darfur that people wring their hands over but do nothing to stop, a global temperature inching ever upward, the UW-Madison administration covering its ears over the diversity dispute and the absence of a second season of Joss Whedon's ""Firefly"" and you've got the barest taste of the acrid stew that is our batch of problems. To use a shameless clichAc, people either try to fill the global kitchen with too many cooks or they just spit out the first bite and go for pizza.
Our society is structured in such a way that we are able to tune out the woes of the world. Giving up has never been so easy as it is in America today, and we hardly even notice we're doing it. We have enough trouble recognizing problems in our own country (2004 election, anyone?) let alone the rest of the world.
It's no wonder so many people in this country don't read the news—it's depressing they say, and nothing ever seems to get better anyway... and besides, ""American Idol"" is on in a few minutes. The truth is, it's hard to really blame them. What's the use in looking for a solution when the whole thing is presented as impossible anyway?
But here is where I'm thinking that maybe, just maybe, the White Queen was right all along. Belief in the impossible has always been the most effective way to stretch the boundaries of the possible. There wouldn't be airplanes or space stations if no one believed in the possibility of flight regardless of the mountain of evidence against it. Kevin Federline definitely would have never released a CD if someone hadn't believed in him, which admittedly goes to show perhaps sometimes it's best to leave some things firmly in the realm of ""it'll never happen.""
All the same, it has always been those who were willing to reject the constraints that society (and in our case the corporate-controlled media) tried to put on their beliefs who have continually proven that ""impossible"" ain't what it used to be.
So serve yourself to an extra helping of idealism and hope now and again. The world won't end if we get some things wrong here and there. It's not like we're getting a whole lot of it right at the moment anyway. We can cover the whole planet in nuclear winter and it'll still be there, waiting for someone to come along and get it right. Basically, consider throwing some jalapeAos into the mix sometime and damn the consequences. The Earth abides.
