Many times in my life, I have told people that hope is a waste. That hope is, in fact, hopeless. Hope, to me, represents faith, only without the grounds for faith. Faith is something you have in your family, in your teammates on the sports field, in the decency of people, in the American dollar (maybe not so much anymore), in your friends that you find most dear, in God. There is no proof that God exists, at least not in a scientific sense. Your friends could abandon you, people could watch someone hurt die without a second thought, Dean could at some point drop a disc. These things are not law. And yet you believe, with all of your heart, and you are seldom wrong.
You believe because you want to believe, because somehow you know that what you have faith in will not fail.
It is an exercise in futility to spend time hoping. Hope is rooting for the Orioles, desperately trying to will them to a World Series from my couch. Hope is a lottery ticket. Hope is wishing that people who have left you will come back and it will be the same as always. It's hoping that there's a mistake and a free pizza gets delivered to your house. It's dreaming of that foul ball, curving perfectly into the stands and into your hands off the bat of your favorite player. Hope is a selfish (or sometimes unselfish) prayer. It's wishing upon a star.
Just like faith, there is no proof that you will have this happen to you. There's simply no way of knowing which lottery ticket wins. But unlike faith, it would be foolish to believe in your heart of hearts that the ticket in your hand is the $4.7 million jackpot. Hope is a bad Bon Jovi song.
After all of this, after years of disdaining every second that I have had to rely on hope, something amazing happens. Barack Obama, a black man with just under four years of experience in the Senate, a man who had to overcome near impossible odds to reach this point, told me to hope. To bank on the relatively unknown. To hope that change is coming to our dying country. The sort of change that seems more impossible than the odds he has already overcome. This man will become the president of our country, the country that I am so often glad to live in, but that I am so often not proud of.
I don't have faith in him yet. I don't know what he will do. Who knows what our new government is capable of? Who knows if the hole is already too deep?
And yet, on Tuesday I voted for him. I went home and sat down. I remembered the way I felt as I stood in line in Baltimore City to vote, and how the air tasted in that stale church, as people buzzed in excitement. No one said the name "Obama" as I stood there, but the news later confirmed what I already knew: Obama had taken 90% of the vote in the city. I knew. I had seen those people on the buses, on the street, in the parks, by the Inner Harbor. They had changed, something had filled them.
That night my eyes clouded with tears as I watched thousands cheer on my television. It was over, and it was all about to start. And I felt something. Something more than just the moment.
So this is what hope feels like, I realized.
You believe because you want to believe, because somehow you know that what you have faith in will not fail.
It is an exercise in futility to spend time hoping. Hope is rooting for the Orioles, desperately trying to will them to a World Series from my couch. Hope is a lottery ticket. Hope is wishing that people who have left you will come back and it will be the same as always. It's hoping that there's a mistake and a free pizza gets delivered to your house. It's dreaming of that foul ball, curving perfectly into the stands and into your hands off the bat of your favorite player. Hope is a selfish (or sometimes unselfish) prayer. It's wishing upon a star.
Just like faith, there is no proof that you will have this happen to you. There's simply no way of knowing which lottery ticket wins. But unlike faith, it would be foolish to believe in your heart of hearts that the ticket in your hand is the $4.7 million jackpot. Hope is a bad Bon Jovi song.
After all of this, after years of disdaining every second that I have had to rely on hope, something amazing happens. Barack Obama, a black man with just under four years of experience in the Senate, a man who had to overcome near impossible odds to reach this point, told me to hope. To bank on the relatively unknown. To hope that change is coming to our dying country. The sort of change that seems more impossible than the odds he has already overcome. This man will become the president of our country, the country that I am so often glad to live in, but that I am so often not proud of.
I don't have faith in him yet. I don't know what he will do. Who knows what our new government is capable of? Who knows if the hole is already too deep?
And yet, on Tuesday I voted for him. I went home and sat down. I remembered the way I felt as I stood in line in Baltimore City to vote, and how the air tasted in that stale church, as people buzzed in excitement. No one said the name "Obama" as I stood there, but the news later confirmed what I already knew: Obama had taken 90% of the vote in the city. I knew. I had seen those people on the buses, on the street, in the parks, by the Inner Harbor. They had changed, something had filled them.
That night my eyes clouded with tears as I watched thousands cheer on my television. It was over, and it was all about to start. And I felt something. Something more than just the moment.
So this is what hope feels like, I realized.
