Nico Pozsar
Jill Darling
Writing 100
Hope
in a Time of Hopelessness
A great many people are not satisfied with the current
state of affairs. They are not only
unhappy with their unfulfilling personal relationships, but also with the state
and the world. I would argue this stems from a combination of a pervasive
feeling of despair coupled with subsequent self-obsession. The proper solution
to this is for we, as individuals, to try to work for something beyond
themselves, and to put their personal needs subservient to those of others.
Since
after World War 2 and the advent of consumerist America many people have lost
hope as they have not only been unable to change the world, but unable to
change themselves. Thus, they have tooken to therapy and the idea that one
should “live for themselves”. These
ideas are perpetuated by many cultural icons such as Oprah (and her “Live the
Life You Want” tour), as well as the enormously popular rapper Drake’s song The Motto, which includes the line “You
only live once: that’s the motto” (Rap Genius). Though many people say the line
in jest, many live their lives through this lens. They live through the
Jeffersonian belief that Earth belongs to the living. As is also echoed in
Cornel West’s Prisoners of Hope, and
Tony Kushner’s Despair is a Lie We Tell
Ourselves, the world is doomed politically as the power hungry elite horde
their capabilities seeking only to ever preserve the status quo while millions
remain hungry and oppressed. This idea of political despair coupled with the
impending doom which awaits in the form of ecological disaster, global warming,
or terrorism, and you create a group of people who believe there will be no
future. Additionally, since we as a society have shaken the dust of that old conservative social order, and the future is doomed, it makes sense
to focus on the self and to cultivate a “transcendental self-attention”
(Lasch).
Without hope, individuals can never hope to live their
lives with any true sense of peace. If you hope for nothing, then why live?
Even if it is for something as silly as some groomed 6 foot 4 athlete to catch
a ball, or for a ball to go into a net, to hope for something makes life worth
living at that moment. Herein lies the issue: “at that moment.” Sports can only
provide hope in temporary doses, though the baseball season is 162 games. To
forget oneself in favor of something more than the individual, something modern
individuals have largely lost, lies lasting hope. In The Dark Years, Nelson Mandela writes how hope was the key to
successfully changing the social order, not only in the big picture, but also
in the current present (Mandela). Overall in the big picture,
Mandela devoted himself to establishing greater equality in South Africa
through various organizations which helped him to perpetuate his cause. While in prison, his overarching hope helped
him keep focus. Did he feel despair? Certainly. He probably believed he would
be in prison for the rest of his life; however, cooperation with the other
inmates to quietly convince guards that all they are looking for is justice and
equality allowed him to maintain his posture and helped him get through the
difficult time he spent while in prison (Mandela). Therefore, by working
cooperatively he was able to learn how to free others, and therefore free
himself.
Reverend Desmond Tutu also expresses similar notions of
hope in his No Future without Forgiveness.
He also uses South Africa as an example of what can be achieved. He writes,
“God
wants to point to us as a possible beacon of hope, a possible paradigm, and to
say, ‘Look at South Africa. They had a nightmare called apartheid. It has
ended. Northern Ireland (or wherever), your nightmare will end too. They had a
problem regarded as intractable. They
are resolving it. No problem anywhere can ever again be considered to be
intractable. There is hope for you too’ (Tutu).”
The example of South
Africa is really quite moving. The nation is a dramatic example of what can
change if you can learn to forgive and let the hatred flow out of you. Of all
the hate filled nations on Earth, who could have possibly predicted the
apartheid system in South Africa to come to an end peacefully? They still have
issues to be sure, but by forgiving and embracing one another in their common
humanity, they grew out of their inhuman oppression. By looking past their
individual preferences and coming together through what they do have in common,
they were able to peacefully shed the shackles of Apartheid and move towards
the 21st century with relative unity.
King also expresses similar sentiments in
his Letter from Birmingham Jail:
I
hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But
even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about
the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham,
even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of
freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is
freedom (King)
King wrote this letter
while in prison, as the title of the letter will tell you. The South was
horribly racist at this time in history, and King probably knew one day he
would be assassinated, but he still had hope. The same hope which allows him to
say: “I have no despair about the future” (King), the same hope which caused
him to not give up hope when publishing this letter, and the same hope when he
marched on Washington and issued his famous “I have a Dream Speech”
(Infoplease). This backbone of hope allowed him to continue his plight, even
when change did not happen immediately, or when the movement faced various
setbacks. However King was not alone in this movement. The Civil Rights
Movement consisted of millions of people, without whose efforts, the entire
movement would be in vain. By working together and cooperating, the American
conscious became a great deal less racist in a matter of years.
Though there are other examples beyond combatting racism
in 20th century. Howard Zinn writes in his Optimism of Uncertainty of how, with the form of mass media we have
now-a-days which is generally sensationalist, biased, lazy, and has a tendency
for sensationalism and doom, how can I stay sane? He elaborates how the mass
media will not report any one of thousands of small acts against the status quo
each day: one has to actively search for those. He then cites a number of valid
historical examples such as the women’s movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and
the LGBTQ movement in the United States, all of which took place over decades
based on millions of small decisions taken on by individuals who stood up for
injustice.
Another example of a small group who used determination
and cooperation in the face of despair to achieve their aims were the Vietnamese
leftists. They underwent a number of rebranding efforts and name changes as the
movement changed over time, but their ideology and goals remained constant:
they wanted a unified, socialist Vietnam. Viet Minh began as the umbrella
organization for all the groups in “Indochina” at the time who fought in a
number of wars for their independence. The Viet Minh was largely dominated by the
Vietnamese communist party and its two main leaders: Ho Chi Minh and party
secretary Nguyen Van Linh. After unofficially forming in 1941 to protest French
imperial rule (with simultaneous Japanese occupation), Western powers and other
Asian powers attempted to squash them out of existence a number of times. After
all, Vietnam, a poor, peasant filled, agrarian society, could not possibly
retaliate against powers with far more guns, soldiers, power, and money than
they, right? Wrong, as it turns out. Beginning in 1941, the Viet Minh fought
against imperialist Japan in World War II alongside the allied forces, notably
the United States on their Pacific front (Szczepanski).
In 1945 Japan ousts the French government, famine hits, and Ho Chi Minh
officially founds the Viet Minh who rise up against the French and Japanese (Szczepanski).
After WWII, and subsequent Japanese defeat and expulsion, the West assumed
France would again take control of South-East Asia (Szczepanski).
The Viet Minh again revolted in what became known as the First Indochina war
which lasted until the French were finally kicked out in 1954 with Vietnam
losing 500,000 soldiers (Vietnam
Gear). Unfortunately, the West again
declared at the Geneva Convention the independence of South Vietnam in 1954, and
by 1959 Ho declared war and the Vietnam War begins (Szczepanski).
The most powerful nation on the planet
at that time, the United States, with a global sphere of influence, declared
war on a tiny agrarian society in the form of Vietnam which had had its
independence for five years. The United States then conducted the most brutal
bombing policy of a tiny peninsula ever (Zinn) and preceded to use Agent Orange
to attempt to starve the Viet Cong, as well as the rest of the people in North
Vietnam. Still the Vietnamese would not give up. By the end of the war, the
National Liberation Front (the most recent evolution of Marxism in Vietnam) had
suffered nearly 1.1 million casualties (Agence
France Presse). According to the United States Department of Veteran
Affairs, the US lost approximately 58,000 soldiers (US Department of Veteran
Affairs). This means that the Vietnamese leftists lost nearly 19 soldiers for
every one US soldier, and they still won. Americans often resent this fact, it was more of a draw. No it was not,
the US pulled out and the puppet state was promptly conquered. The Vietnamese
socialists, though underwent some name changes, fought near continuously for 30
years, lost 1.5 million soldiers, first for their independence and then for their
unity. This is an example to where if people can devote themselves to the
group, and through their sheer force of will and determination they were able
to achieve their goal of creating an independent, socialist Vietnam.
A personal example of mine was my Junior year. Some
background first, the Junior grades for American students applying to colleges
are enormously important and I took this to heart. For the entirety of my
Junior year, upon returning to Northville, MI after living abroad in Germany, I
dedicated myself entirely to my school work, largely per my father’s
instruction. You work hard in high school, you get into a good college, you get
a job, and you get to live a nice bourgeoisie future. Not going to college was
not an option, it is just something that you do so you can get a job. At the
end of my junior year, I completed a number of AP exams, took an ACT prep
course, and saw my initial score raised by five points. I had done everything I
had achieved: everything I could possibly hope for, and yet I still felt a
vague discontent. After the first day of summer I merely shrugged, so what? So
what, I did these things. Nothing had changed. The world was still dying around
me. The grades grew to mean nothing to me, and in my eyes they became symbolic
of my futile efforts. Yes, I had good grades, but at what cost? I hated every
second of my junior year and largely shunned social activity in favor of
studying more for some AP class, or getting in another science section of the
ACT. I had let my frivolous ambition cloud my judgment. What matters in life?
That I can get a good grade on a test, or that I could help others? That I
could memorize the 24 variation of question that are posed on the SAT math
question and how to tackle each of them? Remember,
if you see the words “in terms of”, first plug in the answer A and then E,
which are statistically most likely to be the correct answer, etc etc... However,
since then I have found something far more gratifying. Recently, I have begun
to tutor English to non-native speakers through my church. For me, helping
someone develop a language that will greatly help them in their everyday lives.
Helping individuals made me happier for far longer than getting good grades
did. But without good grades you wouldn’t
have gotten into Michigan. This, I recognize. It was necessary for me to
study and work hard, it still is, but what I devote my life to, how I frame the
decisions I make, and how I spend my time while not working is what makes me truly
happy.
People need two things in their lives to find fulfilment.
They need love and some meaning. How does one find these things? I’m not asking
everyone to drop what they are passionate about in favor of life working full
time at a soup kitchen. A great way to start, is to look beyond yourself and
ask: how can I help someone else today? Individuals make millions upon millions
of choices each day, and by choosing to help others for a small fraction of
those choices, the world will slowly change for the better.
“Oprah’s The Life You Want
Weekend Tour.” Oprah’s, the Life You
Want. VME Media, n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2014 <http://www.oprahweekend.com/events>
West, Cornel. “Prisoners
of Hope.” Alternet. N.p., n.d. Web.
12 Oct. 2014
Tutu, Desmond. No Future without
Forgiveness. The Impossible will Take a Little While. New York: Basic
Books, 2004. Print.
Kushner, Tony. Despair is a Lie We Tell Ourselves. The
Impossible Will Take a Little While. New York: Basic Books, 2004. Print.
“The Motto Lyrics.” Rap Genius. Genius Media Group, Inc. N.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2014
<http://rap.genius.com/425726/Drake-the-motto/Now-she-want-a-photo-you-already-know-though>
Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of
Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York:
W.W Norton, 1979. Print.
Ungar, Rick. “When Conservatives Branded Nelson Mandela a Terrorist.” Forbes. Forbes, 6 December 2013. Web. 17
November 2014.
King,
Martin. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Liberation
Curriculum. N.p, n.d. Web. 12 Oct. 2014
“Civil
Rights Timeline.” Infoplease. N.p,
n.d. Web. 12. Oct. 2014 < http://www.infoplease.com/spot/civilrightstimeline1.html>
Zinn, Howard. “The Optimism of Uncertainty.” N.d. PDF File. <http://www.hu.mtu.edu/~clweberb/Tech_site/Course_Links_files/optimism_of_uncertainty.pdf>
Saxonberg, Steven. Transitions and
Non-Transitions from Communism: Regime Survival in China, Cuba, North Korea, and
Vietnam. N.p: Cambridge University Press,
2013. Web. http://books.google.com/books?id=4rUgAwAAQBAJ&dq=rise+of+communism+in+Vietnam&lr=
Szczepanski,
Allie. “Timeline of the Vietnam War.” About
Education. About.com, n.d. Web. 18 November 2014. < http://asianhistory.about.com/od/warsinasia/tp/TimelineVietnamWar.htm>
“Vietnam War Casualties.” Vietnam
Gear. N.p, n.d. Web. 18 Nov. 2014.
<http://www.vietnamgear.com/casualties.aspx>
“Hanoi Government Press Release.”
Agence France Presse, 3 April, 1995.
“America’s Wars Nov 2014.” US
Department of Veteran Affairs. Nov. 2014. Web. PDF File
Bentley, Phyllis. “Yorkshire and the Novelist.” The Kenyon Review 30.4 (1968): 509-22. JSTOR. PDF file.
Tutu, Desmond. No Future without
Forgiveness. The Impossible will Take a Little While. New York: Basic
Books, 2004. Print.
Loeb, Paul. The Impossible will
Take a Little While. New York: Basic Books, 2004. Print.
Final reflection:
First
I’ll mention a little bit of what I thought I did well. I think the argument
was supported well with both historical examples in the form of Vietnam, as
well as a more recent example of the Civil Rights Movement with Martin Luther
King Jr, as well as the end of Apartheid in South Africa.
Unfortunately,
the rest of the paper does not exactly match the first two paragraphs. The first
paragraph lays out how people aren’t happy, and how this is due to a
combination of a pervasive feeling of despair coupled with narcissism. I argue
the proper solution is for people to devote themselves to something beyond
themselves, and to put their personal needs subservient to those of others.
Then in the second paragraph I talk about how people are selfish. Then the
topic sort of evolves just from saying that everyone’s selfish to talking about
the impossibility of living life without hope, I use Mandela as an example. So,
in that sense, the paper doesn’t flow strictly that well from the thesis. The
claim sort of evolves as it goes down with a sort of central idea of hope.
Unfortunately, my personal reflection paragraph (within the paper, not this)
does not have anything to do with hope, which sort of just features my beliefs
on how one should live their life. So, the paper isn’t conventional as it
doesn’t directly flow from the thesis, but rather slowly evolves. The idea
evolves over time, which make the essay feel scatterbrained.
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