HOPE
Mood:  quizzical



I am not going to write about the political event that happened yesterday. There is substance in that to mull over for days to come. Instead I am going to write about hope.

Probably most great art nowadays is not optimistic art. The list goes on and on of great modern works in art and movies and music that are pessimistic about human nature and humanity's future. And if you ask my mind about it, it will agree; humanity is a mess, there is an awful lot of darkness in human nature and not much light. I myself am very mistrustful of other human beings aside from the small circle of friends and family, because I know, there is much evil in the hearts of men, and little good to show. Most desires are dark desires, and men are driven by their desires, mostly to no good end.

There is no great disappointment where there was not first great hope. I am bitter about humanity for the very reason that my heart is full of longing for a hopeful future for humanity, for a better tomorrow, for a day when the whole species will be lifted out of the mud and into the sunlit uplands of a wise, progressive, and kinder day. My mind says this will never happen. My heart says, damn the probabilities, what could be more important, more worthy of fighting for? If Mankind in the end shows itself as a petty, greedy, self-destroying species, nobody will be terribly surprised. I won't be. But what a wonderful surprise it would be in the end, long after I am dead no doubt, if we do grow up and become what we could become.

Hope is rightly considered not the belief that things will work for the best but the utter commitment of one's soul that they must, and that such a cause, however lost it may be, is the one worth believing in.

This is why I can't do pessimistic art. To me, to show what is is no great accomplishment: any person with any sense at all understands the horrors and senselessness that humanity perpetrates: of war, famine, homelessness, greed, cruelty, murder, rape, poverty, and all the rest. It is no great accomplishment to simply open your eyes, and for those who do not open their eyes, I have no patience to open them for them. To paraphrase Robert Kennedy, I cannot see things as they are and ask, "Why?". I know why, it has been the same story since Cain and Abel, since the first shambling proto-human stole the food out of somebody else's mouth. I must see things that never were and ask, "why not?"

In Exodus, it is not that the scientifically advanced and powerful Centauris are the hopeful characters. Someone else figuring out how not to screw themselves does us little good. It is people like Samia and Dr. Wilbur, toiling in the dark, hoping for long shots, that are the hopeful characters. But sadly, it seems that it is in the darkest of darkness that the light shines brightest, and we may never win that war finally in this life but we can still lose it. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter", and the world begins to die when there are no longer people who fight for it to live. As long as we are not silent and still do fight, maybe in some sense we are already successful.

"If you are sincere, you have success in your heart,
And whatever you do succeeds."
-The I Ching, Hexagram 29, The Abysmal

"The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you."
-Luke 17