Lucinda J. Garthwaite
Just six weeks into the new year, an internet search for “hope” and “2021” yields almost 2 million hits. “Don’t lose hope” gets half a million. Apparently hope makes us
happier . It makes us
healthier. It
motivates learning. It’s
good for business, though it is not, apparently,
good for sales.
In the interest of social change, though, hope has its detractors, among them the writer and activist Roxanne Gay, who wrote in
2019, “I don’t traffic in hope. Realism is more my ministry than is unbridled optimism.” Gay continues, “When we hope, we abdicate responsibility. We allow ourselves to be complacent.”
The Czechoslovakian playwright, activist and then president Václav Havel wrote, “Hope is definitely not the same as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well.” He went so far as to call optimism lazy. It seems to me that laziness is what Roxanne Gay is concerned about, but bright-eyed insistence that things will get better is not even close to hope.
With optimism set aside, the far greater heft of hope becomes clear.
Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (see resource section below) sees hope as an imperative. In fact, he is “persuaded that hopelessness is the enemy of justice.” He continues, “You’re either hopeful, or you’re the problem. There’s no neutral place.”
“Hope”, says Stevenson, “is our superpower. Hope is the thing that gets you to stand up, when others say, ‘Sit down.’ It’s the thing that gets you to speak, when others say, ‘Be quiet.’ (
On Being Interview 12.3.20)
Hope has far more gravitas than mere optimism. Hope is a necessary strategy in the slow work of carving out equity and driving down violence, precious enough in the work of change as to warrant our protection.
There’s danger in the easy conflation of hope with optimism. Providence College undergraduate student Emily Locke worries that diminishment of hope might cause it to be “criticized out of existence...” by activists themselves. That, she warns us, would rob us of change altogether (see resource section below.)
The steady efficacy of hope has not gone unnoticed by those who value power more than justice. History is full of examples of hopelessness deployed to terrible effect.
All of this has made me aware of a solemn responsibility to safeguard hope. Not only throughout history, but yesterday and just this morning, people chose hope in the face of headwinds far more fierce than any I have faced. I’m freshly suspicious of despair, including my own, when hope is the far more powerful way to stand in the wind.
