THE PROBLEM WITH HOPE!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 8, 2009
“He that lives on hopes will die fasting.”
Benjamin Franklin
AUDACITY of HOPE -- an oxymoron
Much is being made of the current economic meltdown but it can be shown that habits of the heart find people grasping for reality as if it were a wave. They hope for a long and durable life supported by imaginary points of bliss. Such people ride these waves to ruin, and then wonder why their lives are spinning out of control.
Credit card debt, buying houses they cannot afford and being puppets to Madison Avenue advertisers so that “the miserable hath no other medicine but only hope,” as Shakespeare puts it.
Main Street blames Wall Street for the crash but it takes two to tango, and Main Street has been a willing dancer to Madison Avenue’s tune. It goes deeper. It is easier to deny reality than to embrace it, easier to ratchet up hope than to find the courage to face despair.
President Barak Obama wrote, “The Audacity of Hope," which helped to launch him into the White House. Hope resonated with readers because hope rings eternal, but hope is a passive vehicle stalled without the engine of courage fueled by the spirit to make necessary change possible.
A better titled and challenge would have been “The Audacity of Courage,” which is always in limited supply. We cannot live on rhetoric, empty promises that matters will change of their own accord, or the consoling promise of optimism without courage.
The “other within,” which I wrote about recently, finds us more inclined to ladle our conflicting self with a dash of hope rather than a pinch of courage. The latter requires that we act differently, learn from our mistakes, embrace our failures, and take risks in order to climb out of our despair. There is no other way.
It is essential that we hit rock bottom, naked and alone, forcing ourselves to find the courage to climb out of the rut we have created for ourselves, shedding our personal baggage that sunk us in the first place. For that attention, we have better than an even chance of “growing up.” Otherwise, we most likely shall give credence to the Italian Proverb: “The man who lives only by hope will die with despair.”
IDENTITY and COURAGE
In Dade and Broward County, Florida, African Americans have been there for centuries. In the late 1950s, Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba with the Cuban Embargo following in 1962. Cubans fled to the Florida peninsula. Now, some forty years later, the Miami-Dade area is little Havana.
The dominant culture in Broward and Brevard County Florida is not American. It is not African American. It is Hispanic. It is so in language, architecture, religion, culture, values, music, food, dress, and expectations. Cubans are energetic, and have no existential identity crisis as described in the “other within.” They have not embraced the American culture. They have defied it displaying the courage to change the culture to suit them, leaving African Americans once again the minority group of the region.
There are as many Spanish speaking television and radio stations as there are those in English. There are as many books, magazines and newspapers in kiosk stands in Spanish as in English. Cubans have colonized the southern tip of Florida and made it their own. .
There are many reasons for this, but the one I am addressing here is that Cuban-Americans have had the courage to establish their Cuban identity irrespective of the wider American culture. They have been able to do this without relying on hope. Of course, they weren’t programmed in conflicting identity as have African Americans.
It is no accident that the Internet has become a conduit for people to live in nostalgia. People of a certain age made redundant by society live often in passive lives. The irony is these “golden years” have not always proven as golden as when they were working.
We are not a society comfortable with leisure. It is one reason in retirement we are constantly on the go. Traveling, I find, is harder work than I ever did on a job. We are programmed to associate work with economic necessity failing to realize it is equally a psychological necessity.
There is nothing wrong with venerating the past. The problem is when we live in the past and cannot escape its grip on us. Nostalgia played a role in the success of IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003), which I wrote as a memoir of the 1940s when I was a boy. What spurred me to write the book was the early death of a boyhood friend whose memory I cherished.
The book was replete with real events in real time with the names of real people of the era, which piqued interest. Although I spent years researching the book, I found many contemporaries remembered the past far better than I did. I am not a nostalgia buff, per se, but wanted to capture a moment in time. Many I sense have not left that time.
Nostalgia in a possible reason hope is so dominant and courage so often an afterthought. Hope rides on the waves of fear (death and dying) and the delusions of misspent dreams. Hope requires no action or unforgivable consequences. Courage requires action and unforgettable consequences.
The generations of The Great Depression and World War Two were conditioned to boundaries and rules which provided identity. There was a line in the sand that once crossed brought about certain consequences with little give. Courage rose to the occasion for survival.
I remember in high school a boy was caught rummaging through another boy’s locker. He was sent to Eldora, the Iowa boys’ reformatory. It was his first offense. I saw countless students in college caught cheating and expelled without ceremony. A teacher or coach could hit you on the side of the head, and that would be the end of it. Parents could give you a good thrashing and nobody heard about it. Some actions had consequences; others didn't. Everyone understood. There were no soft landings.
Nearly everyone I grew up with, mostly lower middle class kids went on to college and have led productive lives. If they failed, there was no one to pick them up. If they got into trouble with the law, there was no one to bail them out. If they found themselves in debt, there was no one to cover their debts. Boundaries and rules were implicit, understood, respected. No one had to make a case for them. Hope wasn’t in their vocabulary.
The upside of this reality was that they were in control. They were not dependent on others for their well-being. They were free, freer than any generation since. They were grownups in the bodies of children. They had no choice. They have moved off stage now with only their children and their children’s children navigating the sandy turf without borders or sand marked boundaries. They are ruling the day, living on hope and fueling hope with sophistry as the main philosophy of the “Information Age.”
WHEN NO ONE is a "GROWN UP"
Longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer once said if you want to understand a society, study the games they play and how they play them. If they play them for re-creation and creative respite from the drudgery of life, it is one thing. It is quite another thing if play is reduced to spectator sport, or mainly passive celebration and activity. Or worst case scenario, play and games are taken more seriously than life and reality, and violence is added to this theater.
Oscar Wilde, author of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1890) gave a cogent analysis of his novel in which the portrait of Gray in the attic grows old, but the man remains young. The book was published 120 years ago, but human nature can’t seem to evolve beyond Wilde’s analysis. To wit:
“The moral is this. All excess, as well as all renunciation brings its own punishment. The painter, Basil Hall ward, worshiping physical beauty far too much, as most painters do, dies by the hand of one in whose soul he has created a monstrous and absurd vanity. Dorian Gray, having led a life of mere sensation and pleasure, tries to kill his conscience, and at that moment kills himself. Lord Henry Wotton seeks to be merely the spectator of life. He finds that those who reject the battle of life are more deeply wounded than those who take part in it.”
In our pervasive celebrity culture in which the few provide vicariously escape for the many, Wilde’s story resonates revealing the dangers to a second hand life. When hope is the window to the soul, when identity is a reflection of the success of our favorite teams, the people with whom we associate, or the prestige of our careers, then our authentic self is lost in second and third hand responses to life. Passion so displaced can grow legs to the irrational.
In July 1994, angry at Columbia’s elimination from the World Cup Soccer Tournament, a gunman shot and killed Andres Escobar, 27, the player who accidentally scored a goal against his own team in a match with the United States, which helped seal the team’s fate, losing to the US by a score of 2 to 1. Barely 48 hours after returning home from Los Angeles, the young man was shot to death outside a restaurant in Medellin.
Riots have broken out at sporting events across the globe when teams favored to win, didn’t, or when fans, angered at the officiating, became a mob with people injured or killed in the chaos. Recently, in China, players in a soccer match attacked the game officials, who were saved from serious injury by the intervention of the police.
A WORLD OUT OF CONTROL
Mayhem has been associated with sporting events since the days of Rome. Mock violence is the appeal of the World Wrestling Federation. Car crashes delight NASCAR devotees, while monster car crashes are the main attraction of demolition derbies. Visceral juices flow when destruction is on display. The brute in us has never died. Take the virtual reality mayhem of video games that delight my grandson. I asked him, “Where is the fun in this?” He looked at me as if I were senile. “Grandpa, killing bad guys is cool!”
Two thousand years ago, Rome used the coliseum to vent the frustrations of restless Romans. They lacked jobs and productive lives. Games were a way to defuse the crowd and avoid mass hysteria. People were bored to death so death became entertainment. Seeing Christians torn to shreds by wild animals starved for days made them feel alive, watching gladiators fight to the death made them feel as if they were shedding their own blood. Even the chariot races, often involving terrible crashes, delighted the fans. We think them barbaric, but actually, it is the same sensational paradigm.
Passive participation in the cares and sorrows of the world has found electronic escape by sitting in front of a computer for hours playing games or surfing the Internet, tweeting a BlackBerry, or talking on a cell phone to displace the anxiety of boredom. I sat next to a lady on a recent cross continental flight and she never took her head up from her laptop, not even to pee, as if she was carrying the weight of the world in her lap. I wonder if she will make it to age fifty.
Obviously, people in a doctor’s office are bound to be a bit anxious. I deal with my anxiety by never going anywhere without a book, not even to the supermarket. People sitting with their hands in their laps would look at me suspiciously as I would contently read on. Invariably, they would react in the same fashion – they would get on their cell phones. The place would come alive with the chatter of anxiety in white noise.
My wonder is crime not a function of boredom. Here in the Tampa Bay Area, murder, forcible sex offenses, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft are the staple of daily local television news. Perhaps one person in a thousand, or perhaps 10,000, or 100,000 is involved in some kind of crime, but crime is news. It titillates the souls of the good people in the larger demographic who have little else to do then devour these statistics, or so it seems.
If all the television stories were about these good people, there would be no television news because nobody would be watching. We are more interested in the exception than the rule. Besides, bad as things are, we want to see how much worse they are for someone else. And the shame of it all, well, that’s especially good copy when it is someone prominent from the larger statistics.
Too many people have too much time on their hands, filling the void with worry about something that is unlikely to happen, which is the definition of anxiety. It is demonstrated in talking incessantly on cell phones, tweeting, or checking emails constantly, which, at best, is mainly superfluous. Then bored to tears deciding to bring some excitement into their mundane lives, they do something stupid, and make the nightly television news, the front page of the morning newspapers, usually with their picture, and now they are somebody. Why is it people don’t realize the greatest freedom of all is anonymity. That is why I like a large city.
A PERSONAL ASIDE
For six years while I was a chemical sales engineer in the Industrial Division of Nalco Chemical Company, I serviced the Prison System of Indiana, doing engineering studies and power plant chemical testing, and of course dealing with and talking to those incarcerated.
In a maximum-security prison, for example, people in the powerhouse were all for some reason former murderers. They seemed just as normal as anyone you might meet on the street. In fact, most prisoners from high to low security facilities were representative of a cross section of American society.
When they would talk to me, and often they did with great candor, they had high hopes for the future, great plans to change their ways once out, but most of these high hopes went up in smoke. They were back in prison almost before you could turn around. That included the murderers, who had murdered again. They had hope, but little courage to change their profile. They claimed the “system” was against them, and to a degree they were right, but they forgot they were part of the system.
We are a “short cut” society, which is likely the modus operandi of CEOs as well as criminals, people on Mains Street as well as Wall Street. We are inclined to justify short cut behavior as if we are hard wired to be no other way. I’ve listened to convicts and corporate executives explained their faux pas and the only difference is the vocabulary.
We have seen this in the current economic meltdown as automotive executives and Wall Street investment bankers have explained their problems away. Some of them could take misdirection counseling from inmates who do it with style.
My nephew when he was in college was a pizza delivery driver using his own vehicle to deliver pizzas to customers. He was robbed several times, a crime of convenience. He was lucky he was never harmed.
Across the Tampa Bay area in recent months, there has been a rash of break-ins into newspaper machines to steal the nickels, dimes, and quarters in the machines. Newspaper vendors get up early in the morning to load these machines eking out a slim living. I wonder if this is a crime of the poor stealing from the poor, or someone else feeling life owes them a living. I’m not sure.
Recently, a luxury craft caught on fire in Tampa Bay and was moving close to shore threatening a Hooter’s Restaurant. The Tampa Fire Marshall ordered all people out of the restaurant to avoid possible injury should the burning vessels not be contained. It was. Scores of people who had been dining did not return to the restaurant. The Hooter manager claimed the restaurant lost thousands of dollars in revenue because people walked out on their checks.
You would think Hooter customers would not behave as common criminals. Now, why is that? Why are we surprised at this behavior? Studies have shown that law-abiding citizens have admitted on surveys they would steal if they thought they could get away with it. Morality takes a holiday when the common good, the sense of responsibility, and the desire to do the right thing is missing.
We have grown into a legalese society where the emphasis is on what is legal, but not necessarily ethical. Ethics be damned! Ethics are not germane to a short cut society.
There is no such thing as a little corruption. It has the same toxic impact on the walking poor for stealing silverware – remember Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables" – as it does when the rich steal from the company store. Both are equally guilty of corruption.
Nigeria is an oil rich country but one of the most impoverished on the globe. The people are blessed with this black gold yet petroleum workers make $50 a month or $600 per year, while those in charge live in luxury making millions. Across the globe this behavior is repeated. Why? Is it politics? Yes. Is it culture? Yes. Is it the political risk of change? No.
Nonetheless, people retreat into hope for change as no one in power has the courage to change.
You cannot hope for change. History has proven that. It takes action. People have been diverted to games, to fads and fancies, to fan worship, and to self-indulgence, and so the beat goes on. The problem of hope extends from one side of the globe in a boundless universe in a world out-of-control standing on its head spinning like a top with the calculus of change stuck in rhetoric.
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