Good questions, my blog is how I am personally handling them at the moment. I tend to find bare dichotomies like realist/idealist to be limiting, paralyzing even.
I think my privacy workshop #1 is realistic, and if you add most of the links i post about, I am really trying to anchor myself in actual events.
I don't see how that has to work against the ideals I seek to stand for and find in potential allies. I think I spend more time saying 'these people have been shown to be correct when it wasn't popular' vs. 'these people are heroic ideals of something or other'.
I find in particular western ideals of individualism, creativity, curiosity, historical and scientific truth, currently under attack in the form of the 'post truth' movement(I call it the Truth Never movement, as it is simply the acceptance of the 1984 world where there are extreme class divisions along single party lines, in or out, and those on the outside are expected to live with contradictions and change their beliefs on demand.
When you hear someone say it is what it is, or everything is everything, or everybody lives in their own little world, or you can never know etc etc, yeah, those are the people who have given up already.
Hypernormalization is what it has also been called. Europeans I have recently met say american culture is like, 'i invite you to a bbq, then you invite me to one, until we get bored and stop inviting each other at all' and that it is very shallow and transactional. This was a great confirmation with me, as I believe the last 10 or so years of my life has just been a witness of the disintegration of the human bonds that were supposed to hold american society together. it is very strange and inhuman. acting human is punished. and these are all things that have happened silently, without any overt legal changes.
I find online this contributes, people have seen too much BS, the government agencies flood the internet with disinformation because they know enough of their unjustifiable unconstitutional behavior is out there now. All they can do is break up groups of people who recognize that together, so that the permanent war can go on.
And this is all about the permanent war, the maniacal military mindset that leaches off the entire country as profiteers rake in money a thousand miles away off every bullet fired and taken by soldiers working far less than they probably deserve.
it is difficult to imagine a mass disease that is so offensive ending well. the united states invasion of iraq has gone down in history like the occupation of slovakia by the 3rd reich, the precursor to war, and a sign that american aggression is a global danger. The current resistance of syria to israeli/american aggression is a representation of that reaction, that since the UN is a failure, military force will have to keep the aggressors at bay. Or there will be war in Syria, which for some reason is what everyone thinks is supposed to bring about the end of the world. So we have that going for us.
Basically, these waters into which I regularly wade, are exactly what americans are afraid to get into and why this word 'overwhelming' is so popular. It's hypernormalization, so many changes no time to talk about them all. And it all looks like the end is near so we're constantly having to reapprise every failure. And no solutions ever, and hope is kindof silly. So who is surprised that a lot of people just check out? Which is the intent anyway of the overlords which is really quite twisted.
This is why I am writing privacy workshop and posting links, because I feel that when I parse it out starting from the appropriate angle, that when I write, that I can help people see the important things through the haze of crap. And that is my ideal, that using my words I can say smart things that shine a light through haze. I think every writer should aspire to that, so yeah it's an ideal.