Hope

Wow.  It has been an amazing day, poignant display of humility, power, history, the future.

I admit I have been rather cynical of the well polished messages of this past presidential campaign.  But this morning I got to thinking about hope.  Hope maybe, I thought, the most powerful weapon against those who seek to oppress.  I thought about Nelson Mandela, who used hope to endure 27 years in a South African prison.  Or someone like Joan Benoit (Samuelson) who was told for years and years she could not beat the best women runners, and a mere 3 months after knee surgery, entered the Olympic Stadium in Los Angeles as the winner of the first Olympic Games woman's marathon in 1984.  

A number of years ago I had a conversation with a friend who had been through horrific problems in her life.  I asked her if she felt hope and she said she still did.  She had not let all the crushing defeats in her life take her hope away.  Hope, she told me, was her defense to people who wanted her to "just go away."

And so it is that today, our new President, asked us to feel hope, to speak hope to those who want greed and self interest to continue to control this country.  

We are in one of the most difficult moments in our generation's history.  We are in an island prison off of South Africa, coming out of knee surgery hoping to run in the Olympics, a woman suffering tremendous public humiliation and defeat. We are all of those and more.  To face the issues, the moments, we must have the audacity to feel hope.  Hope is, in many ways, speaking truth to power.  And we need a lot of that truth speaking right now.