The Meaning of Hope

   I've written about hope a fair amount on this blog. I wrote this post about the importance of not giving up when things looked like they were only going to get worse, and this poem about how hard it is to hold on when it seems like nobody will listen to you. In case you were wondering, I actually wrote that poem after I finished "A Glass House". Fortunately, I feel like the easy kind of hope is a little easier to come by then it was, at least if you hate Donald Trump as much as I and most of America do. 

    When I say, "The easy kind of hope," I'm talking about the kind of hope most Millennials and a lot of Gen Z had when they were kids. It's the kind of hope you have when things are pretty good, but you know they can be a lot better. It's when the economy is good and everyone who has a job wants one, but human rights aren't as far along as you want them to be. It's when you have a path that could lead to great fortune, but you want a path that will bring you personal happiness and you feel that you have a decent chance of success. Those are the kinds of situations where good things happen all the time, and even if you have a run of bad luck there's always something or someone to fall back on, so it's easy to believe that things will get better. 

    We don't live in those times anymore. Now we live in times where at least once a month something awful happens. The economy is doing okay, but everyone thinks a recession is on the horizon. We were making progress in the arena of human rights, but thanks to the Republican party much of our progress is being erased, and nobody decent is happy about that. Success, as we used to define it, is now a long shot, and even if you obtain it, you won't have as much as you might have had in better times. 

      Yet we're still going on. People are leaving jobs that don't bring them joy. People are fighting against the Supreme courts decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. People are fighting back against the companies who don't care that our planet is dying. They aren't doing this because they things will get better anytime soon, but because they don't want to give up on the future they want so badly. 

     That's because when the easy kind of hope starts to fail us, the hard kind of hope kicks in. This is the hope that comes when you know the odds of success are slim, if nonexistent, but you know that you couldn't live with yourself if you didn't at least try. This is when you keep being told the world you want will never exist, but you refuse to stop believing that it will if you just keep trying. It's humanities greatest strength and it's worst weakness, the voice that allows heroes to triumph over evil and villains to win battles nobody thought they would. Hope, like all tools, doesn't care who uses it. 

     That doesn't mean that hope isn't a good thing. I think that hope is one of the things that makes us humans. Most living beings don't hope for a world that's different then what they have, they just try their best to live in the world they were given. Humans are different. From the time we stood up on our own two feet, we've been shaping our world to suit our needs. Now, more then ever, we need to remember that strength isn't defined by victory and what makes a person good isn't knowing that they have all the answers. What makes someone strong is standing by something they value even if they know others disagree. I say this knowing there are many people alive right now who believe things that history will rightfully hate them for. I also know that it wasn't that long ago that most minorities were denied a voice by mainstream society who viewed them as aberrant, who didn't want to have to face the fact that society as they knew it might not be perfect. I don't know if the things I believe are right and good, but I know that I have the right to live in society. I will never get everything I ask for, and that's a good thing, but I have the right to ask for what I want and be told, "If you go down the path everybody else is going, you'll eventually get it." Too often, society won't give that to me or to people like me. Too often, we have to work harder or get luckier because people aren't willing to listen. I don't want to hear any excuses like, "that's just the way life is." Feudalism was once common, but nobody in America right now would be willing to live under it. The world I want is more then possible, and I won't stop fighting until I get it.