A few words on hope

How’s that hopey-changey thing goin’ for ya?

—Sarah Palin, half-term governor of Alaska, speaking about Barack Obama

Hope is that thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops… at all. 

—Emily Dickinson

My life would be impossible without hope.

For as long as I remember, I’ve stuttered. Most of my life has been spent in compensation for this malady, trying to pass it off as no big deal, as no impediment to achieving my goals in life. But the fact is that, despite supportive friends and family, the world does view you differently when you’re different. But, even greater, you view yourself as Other, as not quite the same as those around you, magnifying your flaws to the point where they become huge boulders standing in your path.

With an affliction such as mine, one can go one of two ways: towards desperation, or towards hope. I count myself lucky; again, because of supportive friends and family, I always kept hope foremost in my mind, that something would break my way.

To make a long story short, I eventually found a doctor whose therapy worked. Thanks to keeping faith in things getting better, I’m now a librarian, talking my head off, reading and singing to children in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to do before my therapy.

I don’t tell this personal story to elicit commendation. I tell it to illustrate the centrality of hope in any decent human life.

Hope gives you a chance at a decent life. Hopelessness only leads to death.

a few thoughts from liberal librarian….

by Liberal Librarian

The spectacle provided by the GOP primary race is one that could dishearten anyone who believes in the salutary power of democracy. The race has come down to four candidates, only two of whom have any traction with what passes for the GOP base—and the traction is very light, even then.

One, Willard Mitt Romney, is a scion of wealth, running for the Presidency for no discernible reason other than because he feels it is owed to him due to his class prerogatives. He is a man of no values, of no core beliefs, other than a belief that as a wealthy man his assets should be well nigh untouched.

When he ran against Ted Kennedy for Senate in 1994, he claimed to be to the left of the late senator. He failed in that race. He succeeded in gaining the Massachusetts governorship in 2002, during which time he was able to enact comprehensive health reform, one that formed the basis for President Obama’s own successful effort; he now runs away from that worthwhile achievement, not because he thinks it was a bad reform, but simply because it is now associated with Obama’s own signature piece of legislation, and thus tainted with the imprimatur of the foreign, the socialist, the practically evil.

He ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, and lost quite badly to John McCain. But, unlike everyone else, he didn’t stop running after the primaries were over. He kept a low-level campaign going after the November elections, pressing the flesh, building networks, trying to create an air of inevitability around himself so that he could take on the hated Usurper in 2012 and restore America to whatever America needed to be restored to…..

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