A friend – a good one, at that, one who could ask such a question and deserve more than a turned back and some choice words – today challenged "why do you still keep up hope, still buy that stuff about change?" Clearly this friend, who canvassed and called and contributed for Barack Obama in 2008, had been swept away by the rising waters of negative news that powers the turbines of our modern media.
I couldn’t quickly think of what to say, of how to answer his challenge. I wanted at first to list out the many accomplishments of Obama’s still-young presidency, to overwhelm my friend with evidence and reason and proof that Barack Obama was well on his way – with some notable exceptions – towards fulfilling his long list of campaign promises. Progress has indeed been made, shifts admittedly perhaps more visible to the optimist than to the impatient.
Fumbling still to answer, my friend visibly smug that he’d befuddled me and burst my hope balloon, I finally settled on three words as my reply: "I still believe".
No Polyanna am I, let me assure you. If my wife and friends and colleagues were to agree on one thing about me, it’s that I am always the pragmatist, always the one who prepares for the worst.
As a physician, I understand that change comes slowly, if at all, and only through persistence – only persistence. There is no magical tactic. Actions build and build over time until something changes, not because anything new and dramatic happened, but because of persistence. And patience.
Patience is not the same as indifference, or inaction, however. Action is essential to progress, and every action, no matter how small, surpasses inaction in accomplishment.
Rather, patience understands that in life setback is as common as celebration. It understands that the joy of victory is not always a good counselor, just as the sting of defeat is seldom deadly. It knows, as the graffiti that once beautified the Berlin Wall sagely reminded, that "many small people, who in many small places do many small things, can alter the face of the world."
"Look at the stone-cutter, hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it," once wrote Jacob Riis. "Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone on before."
I know all this, nonetheless I am not complacent. Worries flit about my brain late at night like moths to a porch light. I fret about the lost menagerie, the thousands of irreplaceable species marched to an early extinction by the soldiers of human greed and idleness. I lose sleep over my patients and millions like them walking everyday an economic tightrope with little or no safety net beneath them. My heart races over two wars, loose nukes, calving glaciers, and lunatic political candidates.
But I still believe. I still have hope. I still feel that we have the best man for the job on the job. A man who strengthened my confidence with his bold and courageous words on the Manhattan mosque. A man who, nonetheless, is still just a man, who stumbles and fumbles and concedes too much, and sometimes just plain doesn’t get that governing and politicking are one and the same. A man who needs to hear from us, all of us, loud and clear, every day, about what needs to happen, about what remains left undone, or done incompletely.
To my friend and others who have lost hope, hope is not lost. It is so disheartening to hear and read the darker angels of so many cynical souls mocking their own misplaced hope. Clearly the challenges are daunting. But it’s not hopeless.
And to those who would mock hope, what purpose is served by demeaning hope, calling it wrongheaded? False hopes are as good as true, provided they cause no harm. And, anyhow, between false hope and true we can but infrequently tell the difference. Some say never put your trust in hope, but what else do we have to hold onto in our hours of anxiety, of need?
I’m very hopeful, for to be anything else is to lay down and die. Satisfied? Hell, no. Indignant, forever yes. But I still believe.