On what
makes hope so hard, and why that’s what makes it so important too.
When it
comes to representations of hope in American popular culture, I doubt anything
can compete with the film The Shawshank
Redemption (1994). The film’s culminating and inspirational power rests on
a particularly beautiful quote voiced by Tim Robbins’ Andy: “Hope is a
good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.” But
while the film as a whole certainly illustrates that idea, it’s worth noting
that the quote is the second half to a dialogue begun long before by Morgan
Freeman’s Red, who notes that for men in a world like that of prison, “Hope is a dangerous thing.”
And while for Andy and Red hope is indeed rewarded, it’s worth noting that when
it comes to many (indeed most) of their peers, Red is not necessarily
wrong—that in the darkest situations genuine hope can be incredibly difficult,
if not impossible, to find and achieve; and that striving for it in such
situations can be a painful and even self-defeating quest.
At the
very least, Red’s idea is an important rejoinder to the easiest versions of
hope, the ones that suggest it’s simply a matter of positive thinking in the
face of, well, pretty much anything. Such easy hope is to my mind no different
from the
simplistic type of patriotism about which I’ve written multiple times in this space,
the kind that recites “God bless America” and “greatest country on Earth” and
pledges allegiance by rote. Just as I have argued that genuine patriotism
requires significantly more engagement and work than do those recitations, so
too would I argue that hope is not just—and not really at all—a matter of frame
of mind or attitude. The very suggestion of such simplistic solutions implies
an equality of situation that is frankly utterly divorced from reality—the
thought that an inmate serving a life sentence can simply will him or herself
to hope in the same way that, for example, an American Studies professor
depressed by national narratives can is, among other things, insulting and
patronizing to the inmate.
So how do
those of us who try to stay in the reality-based
community find a more hard and genuine hope? I think that Barack Obama’s recent DNC
speech exemplified that pursuit—Obama more or less overtly admitted that
the hopeful rhetoric of his 2004
DNC speech and his 2008 presidential campaign has had to give way before
many of the realities he and we have faced and experienced over the last four
years; but his speech ended with a powerful series of images of Americans who
continue to give him hope nonetheless. The last such example was to me
particularly striking: a veteran and amputee who has become a Wounded Warrior
participant and athlete, and who in that role is working to give the same hope
he has found to other wounded veterans. Such hope cannot, it seems to me, be
naïve or blind to the world’s realities—an amputee must live every day with the
reality of what has happened to him or her—but neither is it circumscribed by
the worst or hardest of them. If anything, such an example speaks to an ability
not to transcend the realities exactly, but rather to make them into something
forward-looking, something that moves both an individual and his or her
community into a future that includes the realities and yet includes so much
else and so much more: so much potential, so much life, so much, yes, hope.
Next in
the series tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Texts, takes, thoughts on hope in America?
9/17
Memory Day nominees: A tie between two
iconic and iconoclastic
20th century
American authors,
William
Carlos Williams and Ken Kesey.
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