I think we can all sense the tug that is tightening as we draw closer to the election next week. We want to hope again, but we’ve been dashed too often in the recent past, so the doubts and fears creep in. The question becomes, do we cling to our hope that we can win, or do we prepare ourselves to fight the battle of a stolen victory? It becomes agonizing after awhile.

My thoughts today are that our vision is way too small if we put all our hopes in the outcome of an election. I will vote next Tuesday and do everything I can to ensure that as many Democrats get elected as possible. But I’m working real hard to make sure that my hopes are not just pinned on winning. Because even if the Democrats sweep it all, the right wing noise machine will only gear up louder until things are horribly ugly. We’ll fight that battle when it happens, but too much is wrong with our country these days to think that an election will solve it all.

So, where’s the hope? This is a question that has been rolling around in my head alot this last week. I’ve been thinking about a speech I heard a few years ago by Cornell West. He pointed out that any sense of real hope gets crowded out of our culture by cynicism on one hand and superficiality on the other. I think that is the trap we find ourselves in. Because we are committed to questioning – especially authority – we on the left are often focused on how our leaders lead us astray and the cynicism grows. And those on the right depend on some kind of transcendent hope that they think comes from God, miracles or, in the worst case, the rapture. They wave their flags, sing their patriotic songs, ignore reality and hope that God/Bush will keep them safe. This is often what passes for hope in our culture.
I’ll give you a taste of a different approach to hope that came to me this week. I am the Executive Director of a non-profit organization working with kids in trouble. A few weeks ago, we asked some of these young people to draw a picture about their hopes. We chose one picture to have printed on t-shirts. I wish I could copy the image, but don’t have the technical skills to do so, so I’ll just have to describe it and let you draw the mental picture. It is a heart with one eye in it. Around the picture are these words:

See about love
See about peace
See about each other

As they say, out of the mouth of babes comes wisdom about the real meaning of hope.

So today I think about a hope that is grounded in what our eyes can see and our hearts can feel. It is grounded in the very essence of me; what I believe about myself, and therefore what I can see in others. Rather than the superficial hope of the right, my hope embraces the rage, the struggle, the beauty and the love that is part of life. Its the same hope that Madman pointed us to in his diary Dia De Los Muertos. It is about the hope of those in the past that continued to believe even when everything pointed to despair.

I know very little about Buddhism, but recently I’ve been struck by the idea that, just as courage cannot exist without fear, hope cannot exist without despair. When we are surrounded by that despair, our hope is made real.

I think that one of the things we can do for each other, both here on the blogs and in our real life, is to demonstrate our hope and bring it to life. You see, I think hope is contagous. Lets spread some around.