The president of the United States hits ‘send’ and lengthens
the twitter feed. One of the most powerful men in the world, or at least seemingly
so. He addresses the country and world one iPhone screen at a time. He echoes conservative
clichés which go from his fingertips, to the excited eyes of each consumer, and
to the lips of the talking heads. Eventually a conversation starts, between
two, ten, one hundred, one million people, and eventually the entire world.
A white
supremacist drives a vehicle through a crowd of left wing activists, and days
later hurricanes ravage their way through the southern United States. A statue
that had been all but unnoticed to most of the world is destroyed for what it
is believed to represent, while the remains of another scrapes against the
asphalt in the ever swelling currents of what were only days earlier city
streets. The climate is changing, the birds are chirping, the heads are
talking, and even 200 miles and 15 days into the heart of the Scottish hills,
the birds relay the chirps of these talking heads. You cannot be far enough to
escape it all…
I speak
to well rounded, well grounded, intellectuals as well as people I would view as
erratic and divisive. I speak to people of all faiths and all angles of the
political spectrum, and through all the angles and all the compelling (or not
so compelling) perspectives, I find only one commonality amongst them all; hopelessness.
When I think
of hope I think of a noun: a feeling of
expectation for something to happen. That is to assume that hope is a
thing. Hope is concrete, it either exists or does not. So in modern western
society, where we have the conveniences of endless and readily available
information, readily available food and water for our desired consumption, and
even things as simple as laundry facilities and showers, how can hope not exist
abundantly? Everything we could ever want or need is only a few minutes away
should we make any sort of basic effort to attain it. How could we see point
blank, on a daily basis, the potential of humanities creativity, ingenuity, and
innovation, and still hope rarely makes itself visible?
Whether it be on a technological,
political, or even moral scale, the advancements of mankind within the last 3000
years have been exponential! On a timeline of 4.5 billion years, 3000 is only a
blink of an eye. Even in my short lifetime, society has evolved at and
unprecedented rate. In fact, there are few places better to exemplify the
advancements of our species than right here in the United States of America. Even
still, if you were to only view human interaction through the vacuum of social
media, you may just think we had and are still only going backwards…
A wise man told me faith cannot
exist without hope. That is to say, a complete trust or belief in something cannot
exist without first having the expectation that it can be true. Which brings me
to the important distinction between how we view hope.
In one sense it is indeed a noun. I
know that the sun will rise each morning, or the earth will continue its course
and the sun will come into my view, therefore hope exists of its timely arrival
and a new day beginning. But in another sense it is also a verb. Hope is also
an action. It is not a feeling as much as it is an invoked desire. ‘I lift
weights in hopes that I will become strong.’ Though I may be week, I hope that I
will become strong by setting a goal for myself physically and setting out to
achieve it. And that is not baseless, because it is an action which I put into
motion. It is not faith because I am the creator of it and my action is how it
comes into existence.
If I were to spend all my time
hoping for natural disasters to prove climate change to be real, or hoping for
Donald Trump to make a fool out of himself while giving a United Nations
speech, or hoping a terrorist attack happens so that my theory about radical Islamic
refugees can be true, then I most obviously am hoping maliciously for my own
gain, that is the desire to be proven right. But this hope, while its creators would
not willingly admit to it, exists within plain view to a far greater extent
than what I would call a righteous hope. This hope, if brought into action,
creates the opposite effect; hopelessness.
As much as I’d like to point my
fingers at those I disagree with, and as much as my ego requires that I be
proven right in my views of the world, I feel it is counterproductive to
consistently dwell on differences of opinion as it creates a sterile
environment where only hopelessness can grow. And as a living, breathing, voting,
privileged first world citizen, I view
it as my responsibility (should I have an interest in a better world for my
friends, family, neighbors, and species) to do my part to instill hope within
our airstreams, once again. If hope were to take precedence over being proven
right or having your opinion be heard, than it would create an environment for
progress, and maybe even faith.
