San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
More than ever, we must all hang on to hope
There’s a wonderful video that’s gone viral over the past few days. It features a Washington, D.C. teacher who promised to treat all her third-grade students to hot chocolate if she could make a full-court playground basketball shot.
The teacher, Kathleen Fitzpatrick (known at her school as Ms. Fitz), drains the shot with Steph Curry-like aplomb. Her students erupt with pure elation.
While I love seeing the kids celebrate, I get just as big a kick out of watching them as they anticipate the shot; the way they jump up and down with a sense of limitless hope.
That video got me thinking about hope: What it means and what it gives us.
Hope has always been synonymous with the Christmas season, but for many of us, it feels distant right now, vaguely elusive at a time when we’re burdened with so many challenges, reeling from so many setbacks.
We’re nearly two years into a COVID-19 pandemic that has taken the lives of more than 800,000 people in this country and fundamentally altered the shape of our world.
Many of us have lost loved ones or seen them gasping for breath in hospitals. Many of our health care workers have been pushed to the edge of physical and mental endurance in their heroic efforts to care for COVID patients.
Even the luckiest among us have grown exhausted with the way COVID has compromised our social interactions and brought fear into the most mundane moments of our daily lives.
All this is happening at a time when we’re more politically polarized and culturally divided than we’ve been in decades. We’re more apt than ever to retreat into our silos of confirmation bias than to venture out into the uncertainty of dialogue with those who have opposing views.
These developments could induce us to abandon hope, to dismiss the very concept as an indulgent act of willful naivete. In fact, the opposite is true. In our world, hope isn’t sufficient, but it’s necessary. You can’t live on hope, but you can’t live without it either.
Hope isn’t about clinging to Pollyannaish fantasies. It isn’t the setting of unrealistic expectations.
It’s the clear-eyed, hard-nosed determination that there’s always possibility out there and the first step toward attaining it is to project ourselves into it with hope.
As he often did, Martin Luther King Jr. found a perfect way to define the issue.
“We must accept finite disappointment,” he said, “but never lose infinite hope.”
The late, great songwriter Lou Reed often found himself stuck in dark emotional tunnels, which probably explains why he came to embrace positivity with a near-religious zeal.
In his 1984 song “New Sensations” (one of my personal favorites), Reed sings from the perspective of a man who had been arrested two years earlier to the day, on Christmas Eve.
The song’s narrator has turned his life around and is reveling in
simple joys, like having a burger and a Coke in a bar while the patrons are watching a football game, or getting out in the mountain air on his motorcycle.
“I want the principles of a timeless muse/I want to eradicate my negative views,” Reed sings.
Eradicating your negative views doesn’t mean you deny or ignore all the injustice and suffering in the world. It means you don’t get mired in nihilism, you practice the art of appreciating every good moment and, to paraphrase John Lennon, view every problem as a potential solution.
Hope is a renewable source of energy. It always burns clean. It cushions the blows that life inflicts on us and keeps us determined to lift ourselves up to higher ground.
It’s what fortified the young British couples who brought babies into the world as Adolf Hitler’s Luftwaffe relentlessly bombed London. It’s what powered the Freedom Riders as they put their lives on the line to break the stranglehold of segregation in the Deep South.
Like many of you, over the past 22 months, I’ve occasionally found myself sinking into despair; missing the relative ease of pre-COVID life, an ease that I never appreciated when I had it. I’ve asked myself whether we’ve lost our ability to empathize with anyone who votes differently than we do.
To find hope, however, all I have to do is look into the face of my 17-year-old daughter. That’s when I’m reminded how much possibility there is in this world.
I’m reminded how she and so many members of her generation are infinitely more enlightened, insightful, self-aware and sensitive than I could have hoped to be at their age.
Over the past year, I’ve seen her get her driver’s license and work more than 25 hours a week while also excelling in high school. She finds fun in the small details, she revels in interactions with her co-workers and loves to lift their spirits. By example, she reminds me to be positive.
This holiday season, I wish all of you health and fulfillment and wonderful times shared with your loved ones.
Most of all, I wish you hope. We all need it.