Hope (thanks, Alabama)

Hope
by Vaclav Havel

Hope is a state of mind, not a state of the world
Either we have hope within us or we don’t.
Hope is not a prognostication—it’s an orientation of the spirit.
You can’t delegate that to anyone else.
Hope in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy
when things are going well,
or the willingness to invest in enterprises
that are obviously headed for early success,
but rather an ability to work for something to succeed.
Hope is definitely NOT the same as optimism.
It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well,
but the certainty that something makes sense,
regardless of how it turns out.
It is hope, above all, that gives us strength to live
and to continually try new things,
even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.
In the face of this absurdity, life is too precious a thing
to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily,
without meaning, without love, and, finally, without hope.

The "hopeful" story of this week was that on Tuesday, Once a Long Shot, Democrat Doug Jones won the Alabama Senate Race  (something I never expected, nor dared to hoped to see in my lifetime, regardless of how despicable the opponent--this time, a "family values" child molester). Thank you to the impassioned voters of Alabama (especially to the African-American voters, who saved us from the preferred choice of white evangelicals) for allowing us to hope again that to believe that good does sometimes triumph over evil.