“HOPE” when there is nothing left: A thought-piece to American friends.

Our American friends have endured unmitigated disasters over the past three months.

Many of them confess to have abandoned Hope.

And who can blame them?

The future looks bleak to me too.

Perhaps my scribbled words may provide them with some solace.

I contemplate the recent past:

-??? natural disasters, the emergence of fascist, Right Wing regimes, civil wars, pandemics, terrorism, slaughterhouses, book-banning, the daily mind-numbing assault on truth; underpinned by greed, guns, violence, hubris, religious intolerance, misogyny, racism, xenophobia and state sanctioned corruption.

I sadly close my tired eyes. My burdened, impatient, “hope-less” mind wanders.

To Alexandre Dumas’ masterpiece, “The Count of Monte Cristo”.

Edmond Dantes, an innocent man is imprisoned in the harshest of circumstances. From a fellow prisoner Abbe Faria, he learns that “All human wisdom is contained in two words, “Wait and Hope”.

I confess. Reading those words for the first time as a teenage boy, I found the message troubling. I remember impertinently telling my teacher that, in my opinion, “waiting” and “hoping” were luxuries of the lazy - and that patience was an overrated virtue.

My mind wanders again, to the words of Cornell West, the African-American philosopher and intellectual. “I am a prisoner of hope”.

I think I know what he meant. Perhaps his term, “audacious hope” inspired Barack Obama’s masterpiece “The Audacity of Hope”?

William James in his 1879 essay "The Sentiment of Rationality,” described faith as being "the courage to act when doubt is warranted".

Perhaps Paul’s First Epistle to the people of Corinth was right? Maybe Faith, Hope, and Love does abide, after all?

Hesiod, 700 years BCE, wrote of the curse of Zeus on Pandora.

Despite dire warnings, out of her girlish curiosity, she opened the gift-box, releasing all the curses that plagued mankind. Sorrow, disease, violence, greed, madness, and death.

Pandora is mortified. And relents in terror at what she has unleashed by her own stupidity.

She opens the jar again. And releases the last element still in the jar and lets it fly out.

It was Hope.

Albert Camus’ wrote in “Return to Tipasa”.

"In the depths of winter, I learned that within me lay an invincible summer".

So yes, I do have hope.

And that is something nobody can take away from me.

That at least, is something.

And that is enough for me.

“The Adding Machine” is Elmer Rice’s masterpiece of American Expressionism.

Adapted into a musical, it closes in song.

“We laugh, we cry,

We live, we die,

and when we're gone

the world goes on.

We love, we hate,

We learn too late

how small we are,

how little we know”.

The play explores Mr. Zero’s trial for murder, his execution by hanging and his journey to the Afterlife.

Zero is a dull accountant, employed for his entire working life by a faceless company, bullied by a demanding wife. She says “he ‘ain't missed a day, not an hour, not a minute" of work.

Mr. Zero is unaware that his life has been meaningless.

And then something happens. The loyal, unquestioning bean-counter is fired, replaced by an adding machine.

This betrayal drives him to murder his boss. He is arrested, tried in court, and the judge passes sentence. Mr Zero is pronounced guilty and led to his execution.

Now in the afterlife, he works in the "Elysian Fields" sitting ironically behind the Adding Machine which replaced him in real life. And then Mr Zero is fired again. He is to be sent back to Earth to be “reused”.

But in consolation, he is told that he is to be accompanied by a girl.

Her name is “Hope”.

The play ends.

“Hope”. That word resonates with me.

Three centuries ago, in his “Essay on Man” Alexander Pope wrote, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast”.

Sometimes hope is all we have.

And yes, sometimes that is enough.