Room for Hope

Today my heart is full of love and full of hope.  It’s not just because President Obama won; it’s because gay marriage won, and men who try to restrict the rights and safety of women lost.  I’m animated by a vision of a world where all beings prosper.  This may be an impossible dream.  Or maybe it’s only impossible in the way that incandescent light bulbs were impossible before Edison, or flight was impossible before the Wright brothers. 

My vision may be sketchier than either of theirs.  It may share more in common with Da Vinci’s flying machine than it does with the potentially realizable structures proposed by Orville and Wilbur.  It’s vague, rudimentary, and totally unworkable without modification. But nonetheless it’s a vision, and perhaps five hundred or a thousand years from now, someone more intelligent and determined than I will manifest that vision.  Or maybe five or ten years from now many someones will gather together to enact that vision.

Because after all it’s not my vision.  It’s the vision peering out from between the lines of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America—no matter how self-serving it turns out the founding fathers were in drafting those documents.  And I believe that somewhere in the heart of every American, we share the same vision.  And yesterday, collectively as a nation, we took a giant step toward that vision.

But we are told daily that we cannot all experience abundance; abundance is just for the lucky.  And to be honest, no we can’t all live like they do on Cribs or Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.  But we could all live better if we just take what we really nead.  But this might implies looking more disapprovingly at conspicuous consumption than we do poverty and who the poor become as a result of it.  We need to realize that if we create a world in which everyone experiences sufficiency, we need never fear insufficiency.  Conversely, if we draw a boundary between who gets rights honored and needs met we can never be certain which side of that line we’ll be on in the future. 

My mother used to say I was hopelessly naïve.  I’ll take that accusation over the accusation of being hopelessly cynical any day.  Because at least in my hopeless naiveté there is room for hope itself.