Nobody builds all of utopia (or cleans all the things)
Thinking further about those members of Mai Generayshun going around crying WOEZ because somehow We Boomers (what do you mean, we, Dead White Straight Male?) failed to build Utopia in spite of all our advantages -
HAI WE BILDED U A EWTOPIA
and then we came crashing down from that particular trip -
made me consider something that is almost the kind of prompt-question that appears on the LJ homepage these days (Darwin forbid) -
Is it better to have massive ambitions, and fail, or to have modest aims, and succeed?
(Which I think is a theme I have pondered before.)
But anyway, I bet there are people of more or less my generation who are not going around wailing and beating their breasts and dissing on themselves, because they did, actually. accomplish something, even if it wasn't an entire shiny Jerusalem in England's Green and Pleasant, towards making the world a slightly better place.
This segued into a couple of things that my attention glanced over recently - this claim about William Wilberforce (nuanced in this letter) and a report somewhere about protests about memorials to various Canadian worthies who, whatever their achievements, also had down sides to their endeavours (racism, eugenic policies, etc).
The latter is a thing that comes up a lot, quite often in relation to pioneering late C19th-early C20th feminists.
Is is, really, possible, to advance equally on all sides? People have to focus, or nothing gets done. Though I will concede, that on the 'of their time' plea, there were contemporaries who at least got that there were wider issues of social justice related to their own struggles. Though, also, that there are differences between expressing vague ideological sympathy with something that's around in the zeitgeist, and implementing practices based on it.
But we wouldn't be here in a position to make the arguments and take the stances we do without people in the past making steps (some of them hesistant, some of them false) along the way to get here.
But nobody can do everything, and we all (probably) also have our murky actual and virtual cupboards and drawers of shame that could do with turning out.
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