Definition of "solution"

Okay, I really hate it when someone comes come up with an idea about some worldly problem and other folks start thinking it's a corny idea that will have not "solve" anything.

Okay, those who sneer and mock at any kind of activism...give me a brief definition of "solve" please?

Do you define "solve" and "solution" as an immediate resolution that encompasses everyone everywhere? Do you define it as something small that sets some other small thing in motion that over time -- perhaps a long time-- creates a groundswell of change? Does more than one person have to be affected for something to be "solved"? Does the "affected" person have to be someone important or just one small child whose mind and life has been profoundly changed? Is something "solved" when someone who might have been tempted to evil is saved from such a life because the artwork/sermon/whatever intercepted and challenged the evil before it came to that person? OR is something solved when someone who is performing the evil chooses --because he has seen this art-- to stop doing evil?

Did, for instance, Martin Luther King "solve" resolution? Did Desmond Tutu solve the problem of Apartheid? Did Malcolm X solve racism? Does any kind of art, sermon, newspaper article, or film in and of itself "solve" racism or anything?

Not that I'm being a pill or anything...but words and thoughts and concepts should be examined...and the word "solved" is a very deep and very heavy word.

How much visible change must be seen? And in whom must that visible change be seen? And BY whom should that visible change be seen.... for us to consider the agent of change valid...or the effect of that change valid? Should an artist not light a single candle in a dark world? What use is conversation of art then, if change is only measured in large increments?

-C