"Hope"

 It is fitting that an essay on ‘hope’ should be sent during the week we remember the 79^th anniversary of the Normandy invasion, for it was hope for its success that filled the hearts of the millions of those who for most of a decade had lived under the boot of Nazism.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Hope”

June 9, 2023

 

“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement.

Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.”

                                                                                                                                Helen Keller (1880-1968)

                                                                                                                                Optimism, 1903

 

Hope is a verb and a noun. It reflects one’s optimism and posits one’s positive, achievable goals. It should not be confused with Walter Mitty-like grandiose dreams. It speaks of the possible. Hope has been around as long as humans. Speaking to the Corinthians five decades after the death of Jesus, Paul spoke of the need for faith, hope, and charity. Helen Keller, blind and deaf since age two, wrote the words quoted in the rubric above while a student at Radcliffe. Two months before his death, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke in Washington, D.C.: “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” 

 

Politically, hope has been absent in the U.S. for almost a generation. From the end of World War II until the assassination of President Kennedy, America was filled with promise. We faced challenges. Bomb shelters were built for fear of nuclear annihilation, and the 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik lent concern that the Soviets were leading in the space race. But our nation’s response was positive, and we felt safe. On May 25, 1961, in a speech before a joint session of Congress, President Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade – a goal the nation achieved when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon’s surface on July 20, 1969. Sadly, Kennedy did not live to see this, but the U.S., during those years, had a can-do spirit, driven by admiration for Country, self-confidence, and hope.

 

In the second half of the 1960s, with Vietnam, student riots, and a drug-infested and sexually voyeuristic Woodstock, hope dissipated.  Malaise set in during the 1970s, as the country experienced Watergate and the first ever resignation of a President, the ignoble evacuation of Saigon, an oil shock, inflation, prolonged recession, and a stock market that treaded water over ten years. The confidence we felt in those post-War years was gone. But by summer’s end 1982 a feeling of relief spread across the land, and the stock market began to rise. The dragon of inflation had been slain by Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, at the cost of a short but steep recession. Ronald Reagan, a gifted speaker filled with optimism and confident in America’s future, had been elected President in 1980. His “morning in America” persisted into the 1990s, only to be impaled by a tech bubble and the attack on September 11, when Islamic extremists flew four airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing almost 3000 civilians.  

 

In the ensuing twenty-two years, with credit and bank crises, spiraling debt, inflation, and political division, we have never regained that sense of confidence and hope. Many thought the election of Barack Obama signaled such a return. But unfortunately, he chose to deepen racial divide. Today the nation is filled with anger, despair, and a sense of helplessness. Even Moms for liberty is seen as a hate group. We are divided by race, gender, and sexual orientation. Identity has replaced merit. Equality of outcome is deemed more equitable than equal opportunity. Urban politicians, dependent on donations from teachers’ unions, refuse to offer school choice to their cities’ poorest residents. For too many, persistent and rising welfare benefits lead to dependency. Instead of two-parent families, it is said to “take a village” to raise a child.

 

Police are under attack and crime has risen. Our southern border is porous. Cities like San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia have lost not only their charm but their livability, as stores are shuttered and the homeless defecate on streets. A sense of impending doom has descended on the nation’s young, as climate scaremongers say we face an existential crisis, if we persist in using gas stoves and do not drive EVs. Drug use is up, as are suicides, especially among the young. Teachers’ unions have become the most important financial backers of Democrat politicians, yet student scores keep declining, affecting most seriously the poorest in inner cities. Blacks are told to express their grievances, that their fate is to be a victim, dependent on government largesse. Whites are told they are oppressors. The ladder that allows for ascension up the socio-economic steps has been yanked away by the political left. 

 

One consequence has been a decline in birthrates, which, more than climate change, pandemics, or AI, threatens mankind. Exponential economic growth depends upon exponential growth in the labor force. Fertility rates below 2.1, needed to maintain a population, mean an aging and, ultimately, a declining population. Some of that can be made up with immigrants, but, as Malcolm Collins wrote recently in The Telegraph, those in the U.S. “…often don’t realize the pools from which they draw (Central America, South America, and the Caribbean) collectively fell below the sustainable rate in 2019.” This is a problem for the West. Mr. Collins added: “Western countries are like farmers draining an evaporating pool to keep their crops healthy, and ignoring the situation because the pond is unlikely to totally dry up in their lifetimes.”

 

Government, not individual initiative, is seen as the answer to all problems. “We have to paint a dark, bad picture because that’s what justifies more spending,” said Robert Doar, who once ran social services for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in an interview in last weekend’s The Wall Street Journal. Joe Biden projects the image of a doddering old man. Donald Trump, a man I supported twice for President, looks backward, focused on retribution, rather than a brighter future. E Pluribus Unum, the 1782 motto of the United States, is no longer applicable, replaced by the metaphor of a salad bowl, which emphasizes differences, rather than what we have in common. 

 

But the future is never clear. Habits and attitudes change. What climate fear mongers overlook is the ability of species to adapt, and for the Earth to adjust through, for example, what is known as the Iris Effect, which exerts “a significant negative climate feedback that stabilizes tropical temperatures and limits climate sensitivity.” This according to Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi, writing in the February 2022 issue of Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences. They were quoted by Andy Kessler in the June 5, 2023 issue of The Wall Street Journal. Cyanobacteria, one of the earliest known forms of life, has been around, according to microbiologists, for 3.5 billion years. Ctenophores date back 700 million years, Sponges 600 million years, Horseshoe Crabs and the Elephant Shark over 400 million years. Man first evolved in Africa between two and six million years ago, during the late Cenozoic Era. He has lived through myriad temperature changes. Adaption, not scare tactics, should be part of any environmental plan.

 

Man is almost infinitely resourceful and adaptive. He is aspirant, and, when allowed by the political system under which he lives, he is creative, and innovative. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, in the depths of the 1930s Depression, in the early days of World War II, at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in the jungles of Vietnam, after the attack on 9/11, and during the credit crisis of 2008-9, it was hard to be confident of America’s future. But those earlier periods – the two decades after World War II and the 1980s-1990s – showed what was possible. We need leaders today who are honest about our challenges, not issuing canards to deflect the truth. We need leaders who, unafraid to acknowledge our faults, emphasize our goodness. We need leaders who offer hope, not fear. At the start of the Civil War, but in a posthumously published poem, Emily Dickinson wrote; “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul/ And sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.”