Almost 40 years ago I went to Mexico with a young woman I scarcely knew. She would later become my wife and constant companion, but I hardly knew that then and anyway, that's a different story. But she was game, and knew how to have a good time so off we went. I wasn't a really good time, but it was an important trip in many ways. On one level of course I would gain an appreciation of a neighboring culture that was rich and flavorful, but that had a darker side. Violence and machismo and cruelty to animals, and an appalling degree of graft and injustice and poverty that were the gifts (gifts in the manner of a sexually transmitted disease) of the Spanish, the oligarchs and the oil companies, and the fruit companies and the Mother Church. Anyway, I was an idealist and if, the truth be known, a bit of a socialist so I was a little confused by all that I was learning.

My traveling companion and soon to be wife, Golden, took me to meet a woman of her acquaintance who had survived the war by coming to Mexico City from Poland. This woman had been a comrade of my future mother in law in a Socialist youth group in Volynia. As we sat in her apartment overlooking the Reforma, we talked and ate tuna sandwiches and drank coffee. We talked about the war and world events and politics and I expressed a few opinions and this woman, old before her time, said to me, “If you are 18 and you are not a Communist, you have no heart. If you are 50 and still a Communist, you have no head.”

All of this comes to mind in the wake of a conversation I had with my brother today about the nature of idealism. He is over 60 years of age and he is still an idealist. We talked about the American Dream, and when it was lost, or taken from us. Now, Steven is an idealist and thinks that the American Dream of the 1950's is something that can be reclaimed. Disregard for a moment whether this is desirable or not. We are talking about idealism here! I think of myself as a pragmatist, no longer the young idealist chatting away on a sunny Mexico City afternoon in1975, so I debated the other side of the proposition, the darker side. I argued the economics of population growth. There are 6.7 billion of us here on planet Earth and double that by the end of this century. My dear idealistic brother thinks that we could recapture the America of our youth by limiting immigration and paying down the debt right now, and he is angry. He looks around and sees way more than he can deal with. He lives in Los Angeles, one of the world's most diverse cities. He sees double the number of people that lived in the Basin than when he emigrated there from Chicago a generation before. He loved that Los Angeles, (of his youth and his idealistic dreams) and it is changed, and he is angry about that. But he has always been angry about something. I think that drives his idealism. All that anger. All that passion.

I suggested to him that he would always be this way, and I think he conceded the point.

As a pragmatist, I see that change will happen and that it is likely to be the result of chance rather than policy, (too much time working with statistics and demographics I suppose.) Louis Pasteur famously said: "Chance favors the prepared mind." He also said “Whether our efforts are, or not, favored by life, let us be able to say, when we come near the great goal, I have done what I could.” Was Pasteur a pragmatist or an idealist or both? I would be happy if he were both. Maybe he is telling us that we need to be pragmatic and do what we can by preparing ourselves with the data we need to make the best decisions, but to keep up the struggle, to keep that youthful passion, to do everything we are capable of to realize our dreams, whether or not we ever do.