“I can’t be a pessimist, because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter”. (James Baldwin, quoted on NPR.org)

My comment: I spent some time thinking about this, and concluded that I didn’t agree with it. Being a realist (another way of saying a pessimist!) doesn’t imply that life is an academic matter. On the contrary, the way life on Earth seems to be regressing, not to mention the climate change that humans will be far too late to stop (partly because of optimists!), suggests to me that the realists are the people most likely to overturn (or maybe slow) the short-sighted and me-me-me attitude of the blinkered optimists, whose sole aim, it seems, is to protect their income and their investments.

Does this make sense? (as my former geography teacher told us: “describe the problem and draw a map”