We Need Hope!
“All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.”–Winston Churchill.
We need hope for a better world, for a better tomorrow, and for those in our hospitals to recover. Yesterday I heard they admitted my brother to the VA Hospital ER with a positive Covid test. Both his daughters living with him have tested positive. He has serious underlying conditions. So, things don’t look good. I heard last night that he has pneumonia starting in his lungs. But there is still hope for a recovery.
We don’t know how the coronavirus kills. Why some recover and some die. But there is hope. We now know more than we did in March about how to treat people in the hospitals. We have new treatment regimens that are helping some to recover. I think those that lived had Hope.
What is Hope?
According to the Oxford Dictionary on lexico.com, Hope is a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen. It is a state of mind. It is the lens or framework through which you see events around you. Hope provides a positive view of events. We always have a choice of how we respond to events either positively with hope or negatively with despair.
As the San Ramon California choir so eloquently tells us in their song, Give us Hope, after their school was closed in March, all they need is hope to carry on. They didn’t have their proms and special events, but they need hope for a future to carry on.
As Dr. Edith Egar discusses in her book, The Gift, our thoughts and beliefs determine, and often limit, how we feel, what we do, and what we think is possible. We all have this capacity to choose. When nothing helpful or nourishing is coming from the outside, that is precisely when we have the possibility to discover who we really are. If you haven’t read her book yet, I would highly recommend it to you. Dr. Egar survived Auschwitz and other concentration camps during World War II.
Hope is what I have when I think of my brother in the hospital. Hope is also what we have when we consider the problems our nation and the world are facing today:
Food insecurity: 25% of American household are facing a lack of food because of covid
Education: Remote education isn’t working very well today, but we are going to need better long-term solutions. The work of tomorrow isn’t the same as it has been. Schools have to catch up.
Poverty and economic insecurity: What work we do and how we get paid is a growing problem. Technology is changing work at a faster pace. The jobs we have today may not be here tomorrow. AI will create more leisure time.
Health care: We create more long-term problems for ourselves by not providing health care for everyone. It is time to figure it out.
Work of the future: How will we define work. Who will work? What do we do for the people who aren’t able to work due to training or health reasons?
Justice: We must fix the system from start to finish. The legislators, to the courts, and in the streets, all need changes.
Equality: We dream of equality. We hope for equality. But it eludes us. We take two steps forward and one step back.
Voting Rights: We need a national voting rights act so all can vote.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech “I Have a Dream” expresses what hope meant to him. He had a dream of a better tomorrow. He had a dream where America rises to the greatness envisioned by our founding fathers. We need to keep that hope before us as we ponder these problems.
I have a dream that my brother will survive his hospital stay, that all 145,000,000 voters will rise and find common solutions to these problems. I have hope!
“Hope can be a powerful force. Maybe there’s no actual magic in it, but when you know what you hope for most and hold it like a light within you, you can make things happen, almost like magic.”–Laini Taylor.
“You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all the world’s problems at once but never underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious, and hope can take on a life of its own.”–Michelle Obama.
“The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”–Barbara Kingsolver.
