hope
/hōp/ noun
- a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.
The Washington Post asked the nation for a word that represented 2021: “Relentless and disappointing. Messy and clarifying. Fragile and unexpected. Full of growth, grief, change and survival. Enlightening and tumultuous. Transformational and lonely. Exhausting, exhausting, exhausting.”
2022 has so many things on the cusp: voting rights, addressing the climate crisis, the pandemic, and whether the Supreme Court will follow the roots of its past on all these issues or strike forward with a new partisan agenda. Have we become too cynical to hope?
Hope is not a strategy. Hope is the absence of a strategy.
“[H]ope – standing alone, unmoored to any concrete action or contingency plans – is not a strategy. But we would do well to remember that when it comes down to it, hope is not just a strategy; it is the only strategy America really has, and it should spur us to action, instead of remaining paralyzed by endless, realist, what-ifs…. “
Some might say hope is what you do when you have no control. But hope is the fuel that drives people to engage in an activity or plan.
Hope is embodied in the faith in the community and the trust in the populace. As Demian Entrekin stated in The New Trinity, the “Me Generation” is dead. Hegemonic freedom no longer serves the greater good. We have livestreamed our personal opinions, acquiesced to societal discord so that the burgeoning oligarchy can maintain the status quo. The algorithms of Big Tech create artificial allies and adversaries.
“[Hope is] the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we [editors italics] can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day (Barack Obama).”
“The Constitution,” said Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes “is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based on imperfect knowledge.”
Inspiration for this issue came from a recent article in the New York Times:
“Watch Night, as we celebrate it now, began on New Year’s Eve 1862, the night before Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation went into effect on Jan. 1. Black congregations in the North and the South gathered to keep vigil and pray for the freedom of enslaved people in Confederate states. Frederick Douglass captured the anticipation that marked that day… ‘It surpasses our most enthusiastic hopes that we live at such a time and are likely to witness the downfall, at least the legal downfall, of slavery in America. It is a moment for joy, thanksgiving and praise…’
“Watch Night argues that God has answered our prayers for liberation both spiritual and material. …That was the complicated thrill of the new year; it was danger, possibility, love and hope condensed into competing parties and church services. Often we would attend Watch Night and then go to the club shouting and shaking our hips at both. We were struggling with who we wanted to become and wrestling with the ever-present options and temptations of Black life in America.”
For this issue, we invite authors to speculate on the best ways to bolster a teetering democracy. We ask how community is the secret of our success as a species. We ask you how your communities raise you from the challenges that are insurmountable alone. We ask how you inspire mindfulness in those around you. We ask how you will reach across divides and how your choices will help to mend the rifts in our society.
“When the signers of the Declaration of Independence put their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor on the line against the greatest military power on Earth, they certainly had no guarantee of a successful outcome. They did what they thought was right – what they had to do – and then they prayed and (yes) hoped for the best. Eleven years later, the Framers of the Constitution attempted an experiment unlike any other: government by the governed. They had no assurance this experiment would work out.”
“No individual is going to save us. We must rise up together (Bernie Sanders).”
“If there is one thing that all the armies of the world cannot overcome, it is an idea whose time has come (Victor Hugo).”
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