In our efforts to walk the middle path between hope and fear we sometimes find that a lifetime of programming has made fear the easier choice, just as a car with an underinflated tire will pull in that direction. Today we make a conscious effort to pump up the flat. Hopeful signs are abundant and clear, lacking only in emphasis.
Hope is the expectation that the events we wish for will occur. In classical Greek mythology, Zeus gave to Pandora a gift which was never to be opened. When Pandora’s curiosity overwhelmed her discretion and she opened the gift, all the ills of humanity escaped with every disaster and disease which has plagued us ever since. Trapped under the lid, Hope remained; a singular quality seemingly small in comparison to the evils of the world, but one which has sustained humanity in the face of overwhelming odds.
Hope is essential for good health, both mental and physical. Much of the disease which plagues the body begins in the mind and in the spirit, where hope functions to protect and to heal. Hope for Christians is the companion of faith, “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Hope is the lifeline that religion casts into the beyond to anchor us to something that will elevate our lives above the daily struggle for the survival of the body. Hope is the offering we make of that portion of our daily struggle for the benefit of our children and grandchildren, our family, our community, our nation.
Hope is also a tender place to be guarded against the grasping of those who would bend our will to their own desires. The clever play of fear against hope attempts to solicit our hard earned money, our vote or our compliance. To defend the sale of plasticized cardboard boxes full of high-fat, high calorie processed food to children, McDonalds portrays Happy Meals as boxes of hope, as if accountability for the health problems of thousands of could be purchased by a meager donation to some worthy cause in a kind of “cap and trade” exchange for junk food emissions. Their effort is but one example of the technique. Many marketing companies offer the fulfillment of our hopes and dreams in the purchase of their material goods.
Politicians and pundits offer us false dilemmas in a choice between our unrealized fears and their hopeful platitudes. Every two, four and six years hope is dangled in front of us like a carrot on a stick, always just out of reach. So strong is the motivation of hope that we follow the most appealing carrot trustingly, never noticing that we are traveling in circles like oxen turning a mill.
We travel in circles and so history has a tendency to repeat. Where it doesn’t repeat exactly, if often rhymes. We are similar in many ways to the generation of our grandparents and our great-grandparents at the beginning of the 20th century. Arrogance and naiveté led to WWI, the Great Depression and act II of the Great War played out in World War II. These trials and tribulations forged the generation of our parents, the Greatest Generation, whose efforts yielded a period of the greatest peace and prosperity the world had ever seen.
The arrogance and naiveté of your author’s generation of Baby Boomers has produced challenges as great as any faced by our parents, and this is the legacy we will leave our children. Yet hope is still abundant and readily found in those children. It is being forged on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. It will continue to be found in the generation of young people who are emerging from the fire with a humility born of hardship to counter the hubris of their parents and with a worldly wisdom inspired by hope to counter the bitterness of innocence betrayed.
