I think the tension between ideal and reality is interesting. I'm a bit scared of people who think you must adhere to this narrow ideal, or else, you deserve anything that happens to you. Ideals are illusions, that help us to see something else, but they can never really be reality, because reality always has problems. People who think we would be in utopia if only every non married person never had sex, if everyone prayed in school, and if no one was on welfare are fooling themselves. Someone is always going to have sex, there are other important values to focus on(like the separation of church and state), and just look at the third world to know what that sort of no safety net thing causes.. So people have to compromise.

For example, I'd love to always buy from a business that was great for the environment, treated workers well, and not a huge corporation. But, there are compromises. I was reading in Color Lines about how Starbucks is really pretty good for employees and sometimes tries to help out the environment. Good. But what about not being huge? Not going to happen. And what if the local coffee merchant is small and good with workers, but to keep prices down buys the cheaper beans from underpaid people? So one has to decide what is most important.