On the Death of Hope

I don't have to tell you things are bad, Everybody knows things are bad, Pollutions The icecaps are melting quick, Kids trust no one The air is unfit to breathe, our food is unfit to eat, It's an inferno land, @*!$ all that shit; we are here together in this country as one It's all about peace, love and unity, Sing it, peace, love and unity ~ Bliss N Eso, The Sea is Rising

What has happened to the hopeless idealism that once befell our land? What happened to what made this country great? I remember the emotion that drove the campaign in 2008 for Obama and the idea of hope that made my mother cry when she watched the results come in. Whats happened now? Why is our hope gone? There are a lot of problems in the world. Global warming is running off the charts, starvation exists and grows, politics is becoming more partisan, inequalities still exist, gender disparities are ingrained in our business practices, education in America is failing. The world is bleak and bitter. It sucks. Its easy to lose face when faced with such a tumultuous system. Its easy to prepare for the end. Its easy to acknowledge the causes of our eventual Armageddon. Vonnegut, in his later years, looked back already in retrospect of the bomb. Its easy to become a pessimist. Its easy to give up. Its easy to throw your hands in the air and exist on the total edge of physical and mental collapse (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.) Its common to brace yourself for the breakdown of society, but how is that productive? Im not blaming anyone that stops caring every once and a while. Im not saying its bad to say that things are terrible. I say that- a lot. But what concerns me is the culture of pessimism- those people that think that were beyond reform, beyond being able to save the planet. Granted, there will always be people who think that racism is thing of the past, even when its just as overt as it was perverse years ago. What worries me more is those people who understand that racism exists, but think that the battle will never be won- that the powers that be are so strong, that what we do does little to make change.

I have a lot of good friends who live like this. My greatest role model taught me while living in this mindset for years. The fact that Obamas slogan in 2012 was Forward shows that hope has died. We are stuck thinking in the future-fearing the system-rather than embracing the possibility of change. In doing this, we lose our humanity and become the same faceless figures we criticize. We lose faith in our fellow man and see only the negative. We lose our love of society, our love of each other, and our reason to fight for a better world. We lose the beautiful moments in life, like sharing a coffee at 7:23 am and talking about the previous night with a close friend. We lose the love of those late nights sitting in awe at an album (that youve heard 18 times before) with your truest love. We forget the sun resting on the shoulder of one we love so much in the morning. We forget those evenings where the silence of the dusk is broken only by the sound of geese flying over Lake Michigan. We forget these simple- but beautiful- moments that make humanity something we strive for and something we create art for. We lose our love for people in those moments. We lose our reason to keep fighting. As Bliss N Eso rapped, I dont have to tell you things are bad. Everyone knows this. We very well may be approaching nuclear Armageddon, but if we allow ourselves to become pessimistic about our future we are no better than those faceless agents that keep us hurdling towards destruction. What is worse is that we remove our own humanity in the process. Hope is dead and we have killed it. But we can resurrect hope. We must have hope. We cant go down without a fight. And if were going to go down at all, we might as well have something beautiful to hold on to as we fall. Its all about peace, love, and unity. Sing it. Peace, love, and unity.