I just don’t get this. What is everybody’s problem with the word HOPE? Why is having hope a bad thing? All I can think is that this view of hope being spouted here is from a bitter and/or White perspective. Maybe hope is a very different thing for angry white folks than it is for angry people of color. Obama is speaking of hope as a Black man. He is speaking of hope in the way Martin Luther King Jr. so often spoke of hope. He is speaking of it as an agent of change. Not a wishful little fantasy. He is speaking of it in the same way some of the great leaders of this country and world have thought of it. Maybe you people who speak so negatively of hope have never really had to hope. Or for some other reason don’t know what real hope is. More below...
My dad was a carpenter. He decided to start a business in the early 1960’s as a Native American man. And that took a lot of hope to do. His family was counting on him to make a living in a business that was almost all white. And while he had his faults, one thing he was determined to do was provide for his family. So he took a leap of faith based on his talent, hard work and experience and started his own company. He’d spent too much time working for white people, but enough time to figure out how they thought at that time. So even when he was the owner of his own business, he still would put up with a bit of shit from subcontractors, electricians, plumbers, whoever, to get them on board.
Some of them thought they could take advantage of a dumb Indian. Sign a contract, show up when they felt like it, do a half-assed job. But once he had them committed and contracts signed, he was in complete control. He could be hard man and I remember him being what I thought was too nice to some real jerks. I was kind of embarrassed in a way cuz I knew my dad was certainly tough on us. Why be nice to these white men? But when I started doing clean-up on his jobs I found out once he had these jerks signed to a contract, he was fair, but he took no shit at all from them.
I see Obama as being this way. He’ll bring the insurance companies, big oil, all of them to the table because he has to. But once he’s got them there, he will be in control. He will be the PRESIDENT. He won’t have to answer to them. He’ll answer to us.
So I’m not worried about him being taken advantage of. He’ll be like my dad and whole lot of other people of color in this country who had a hope of working for themselves and had to learn to work with white people in power when starting their own business. He’ll let them have a seat at the table, but once there he’ll lay down the law. So I am glad Obama has hope. Hope is the beginning of action. Below is one of his comments on faith and hope. It is what I see hope as. It is was most people who support Obama see hope as.
There are also a bunch of quotations below on hope by Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Samuel Johnson and others. None of these people had an easy life, but they had hope which spurred them to action. That is they kind of hope I’m talking about. And the kind of hope I see Obama speaking of.
Barack Obama:
I was drawn to the power of the African American religious tradition to spur social change. Out of necessity, the black church had to minister to the whole person. Out of necessity, the black church rarely had the luxury of separating individual salvation from collective salvation. It had to serve as the center of the community's political, economic, and social as well as spiritual life; it understood in an intimate way the biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and principalities. In the history of these struggles, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; rather, it was an active, palpable agent in the world.
Hold fast to dreams for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.
-- Langston Hughes.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream.
Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.
Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality."
"We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope."
A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.
We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the positive affirmation of peace.
Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784)
"Samuel Johnson was Large and powerfully built; Johnson had poor eyesight, was hard of hearing and had a scarred face as a result of childhood scrofula. He also had a number of tics and other involuntary movements; the symptoms described by Boswell suggest that Johnson had Tourette Syndrome[11] and obsessive-compulsive disorder."
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
I think most of us are aware of the treatment of individuals with Tourette Syndrome today. (My son has Tourette Syndrome) Imagine having back in the 1700’s. In spite of this he was a very accomplished man and the writer of the first comprehensive English dictionary and the second most quoted man after Shakespeare.
Where there is no hope, there can be no endeavor.
"There is no temper so generally indulged as hope; other passions operate by starts on particular occasions, or in certain parts of life; but hope begins with the first power of comparing our actual with our possible state, and attends us through every stage and period, always urging us forward to new acquisitions, and holding out some distant blessing to our view, promising us either relief from pain, or increase of happiness."
Whatever enlarges hope will also exalt courage.
Samuel Johnson
Hope is necessary in every condition.
"All industry must be excited by hope."
Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.
If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships - the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world at peace.
We have always held to the hope, the belief, the conviction that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon
Abraham Lincoln
My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth.
He who molds the public sentiment... makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to make.
Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.
I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.
"A house divided against itself cannot stand."
"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."
"If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first four sharpening the axe."
Various people
Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.
-- Augustine of Hippo.
Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.
--Vaclav Havel
What is true of the individual will be tomorrow true of the whole nation if individuals will but refuse to lose heart and hope.
--Mohandas Gandhi
We judge of man's wisdom by his hope. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wise men put their trust in ideas and not in circumstances.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hope is the companion of power, and mother of success; for who so hopes strongly has within him the gift of miracles.
Samuel Smiles
Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.
-- Pliny the Elder.
If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost:
that is where they should be. Now, put foundations under them.
-- Henry David Thoreau
There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great, and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something better tomorrow.
-- Orison Marden.
Hope is passion for what is possible.
-- Soren Kierkegaard.
Let perseverance be your engine and hope your fuel.
-- H. Jackson Brown Jr.
The capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life. It provides human beings with a sense of destination and the energy to get started.
-- Norman Cousins.
Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.
-- Elie Wiesel.
Hope is medicine for a soul that's sick and tired.
-- Eric Swensson.
It has never been, and never will be easy work! But the road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination.
--Marion Zimmer Bradley
Hope is the companion of power, and mother of success; for who so hopes strongly has within him the gift of miracles.
-- Samuel Smiles.
Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.
-- Lin Yutang.
It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.
-- Seneca.
Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent.
--Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
Hope is putting faith to work when doubting would be easier.
--Author Unknown