While couched in idealistic terms, the decision to go to the moon had everything to do with the hard-nosed political calculations of the cold war, a determination to beat the Soviet Union that began with the Soviets' surprise launching of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, which led to the creation of NASA a year later.
In 2006, the Pentagon found that when asked their main motivation for enlisting, 61.9percentt cited a reason other than "service to country," a figure that the RAND Corporation's Beth Asch cautioned could actually be higher since new recruits often cast their decision in idealistic terms.
With the kind of political clarity that I had not heard before and infrequently since, Alinsky sketched out a hard-headed yet ultimately idealistic picture of how democratic decision-making works in the world as it is.
"I know this sounds idealistic, but it was a conscious decision to make a film for and about Rwandans," Mr. Chung, 29, said in an interview last spring during the Cannes Film Festival, where his film had its premiere.
I don't take this position lightly even though some have called me (and others taking the same position) stubborn, ignorant, entitled, idealistic, and anti-pragmatic for this decision.
His decision was rash and blindly idealistic, but not sinister or traitorous.
"There's a curious thing about boomers, because in their early formative years they went through a very idealistic time," says Larry Cohen, director of consumer financial decisions at SRI Consulting Business Intelligence.
In this decision, one could see the same sensitive, idealistic man who wrote "Dreams From My Father".
That surprises some formerly idealistic employees, who believed that Schacht would reverse the decision on FMP and make it retroactive.
