Progressive hope vs. conservative brainwashing

There is a widespread serious misunderstanding in this community about the definition of "hope". Apparently a good number of people don't even know what it means to hope any more!  They insist on confusing it with wishing and fantasy and kumbaya and fairy dust.  Hope is a much stronger word than that and a much more complicated concept than that and a much more effective power than that. Detractors say "you won't make anything happen by "just" hoping for it." Well who said we were "just" hoping?  Who says we aren't backing up our hope with action?  Hope energizes people to do the hard work required to get difficult things done.  Hope inspires people to push themselves farther than they ever thought they could.  Hope is believing in spite of the evidence and working until you watch the evidence change.

Every significant social progress that has ever happened in this country looked impossible at one time. But people dared to hope that they could overcome those seemingly impossible obstacles.  Through lots of people encouraging each other, sometimes through long periods of work that looked fruitless, eventually the change broke through, and just to take an example, women got the right to vote.

If these naysayers had been around then, they would have said: oh, men are never going to give women the right to vote.  "it's a waste of effort for this Seneca Falls group to keep giving speeches encouraging women to hope for a future where they might vote.  what good is that going to do? every time they ever tried to pass a law for women's suffrage it gets voted down.  Look how often they have failed!  This is useless.  until I see some evidence that this is going to happen right now, I think all this hope talk is ridiculous."

But it was that hope that kept those women working and talking and persuading and slowly, slowly bringing more and more people to their cause, men as well as women, suffering through long periods of incremental progress as well as periods of stagnation and moving backward.   it looked impossible to the naysayers until the very day it happened.  but it did happen.  and it wouldn;t have happened without hope.  hope and hard work, yes, but there is no such thing as hard work without hope. People who don't really believe in what they are doing don't work as hard or as long.  People who do believe in what they are doing will crawl over ground glass to get the job done.  Hope keeps people alive and striving long after a person without hope has given up.  And as for Kumbaya: plenty a chorus of kumbaya sung in many a southern black church gave plenty of people the courage to hold on for one more day and keep walking during the bus boycott and keep getting beaten for registering people to vote and keep going to those protests and freedom rides and keep from succumbing to despair when lynching was tacitly supported by local law enforcement.  So words that encourage people to believe in what they are doing, speeches that engender a powerful sense of hope, can and have moved mountains once thought immovable.  (To be honest, I hear HRC and JRE trying to inspire their supporters with a sense of vision too, they are just avoiding using the H word.)

I can just imagine these same people who laugh at us and call us hopemongers listening to the I have a dream speech:  "What is the matter with him?  He thinks that talking about a dream of equal rights for blacks is going to make it happen?  The country is not ready for this!  Those Dixiecrats in the South play hardball!  what good is talking about a dream going to do?  what has he ever accomplished?  can he prove that all this hope is going to produce any results?"  In fact there is a famous anecdotal encounter of MLK being heckled at a public appearance in 1965 with the words "we don't need dreams, we need jobs!" MLK was surrounded by frustration and pressure from people who did not understand that ideas and vision are an essential precursor to action because people need to dream the impossible dream before they can believe that addressing and tackling huge injustice problems is even possible.  Fortunately MLK's dream inspired enough other people with such powerful hope that they were willing to work hard and risk their LIVES to make that hope a reality.  and in large part they succeeded, although there is still a lot of work to do to build the beloved community.

Now we have all these people demanding to see evidence first before they will even attempt to do the hard thing or the "impossible" thing.  Complaining after ONE YEAR that the new strategy for building Dem majorities "isn't working" even though we had a historic pick up of seats in 2006.   Instead of being encouraged by a good start people are griping that things are not moving fast enough.  After one year!  WTF?

I personally believe that all these people denying the power of hope have simply bought into Republican brainwashing.  The same brainwashing that convinced millions of people that being a liberal is bad and that Rush Limbaugh is brilliant and Saddam had something to do with 9-11 and all Christians are conservative is the same brainwashing that says "ooo the big bad republicans are so organized and so numerous and so powerful and in control of all the media and have all the talk radio stations and there's no way we could ever get enough votes to stop them and all these people getting excited about a hopeful vision of how we might stop them are just kidding themselves."

Men trying to maintain unjust power always have this as a primary goal: crush people who encourage a vision of hope.  Unjust power always tries to present itself as being so all-powerful that even imagining a vision for opposing them becomes unthinkable.  Hope was a thoughtcrime in 1984.  Unjust power always tries to present the status quo as being so firmly entrenched as to be insurmountable.  Therefore, the greatest victory of the Republican noise machine is the way they have all you guys believing that they are invincible. Well, you act on what you believe.  If you believe they are all-powerful then you'll be inspired to act that way.

I believe they are vulnerable.  I believe the R party is falling apart.  I believe their leadership is in chaos and their internal squabbling is rampant.  They can't even work their presidential nominating process the way they want to and the way they used to.  Just yesterday Huckabee was bragging about ignoring the party's talking points.  I believe rank and file Rs are beginning to see which way the wind is blowing and are ready to break those ranks.  Capitol Hill Republicans are retiring because it's no fun being in the minority and they think they are going to be in the minority for a long time. Others who were riding high back in the golden days of Gingrich and Rove are facing tough campaigns in areas that "everyone" used to consider safe seats.  Still others are tired of being asked to vote against things that they and their constituents actually support (ending the war, funding SCHIP, health insurance reform) merely for the sake of party unity and propping up an unpopular lame duck president.  If enough of us hopemongers band together, if we draw in Dem-leaning independents and Repub-leaning independents and even some actual Republicans to vote with us, we can overwhelm the crumbling and dispirited R power structure and take our country back.

That's my vision and I'm sticking to it.  And, believing in that vision, I am going to work as hard as I can to make it a reality in my lifetime.  I don't need a president to fight for me.  The President is only one man/woman.  I want a president who will inspire me to fight, alongside him and alongside millions of others who buy into the same vision.  I want a nominee at the top of the ticket who will attract a broad based coalition and build the D party with the formerly uninvolved and apathetic, "Reagan Democrats" who want to return to the fold, disgruntled Republicans, and young people.  Encouraging record turnout for Dem candidates will elect more real Dems--not blue dogs--in Congressional and downticket races.  (BTW, blue dogs are opportunistic cowards who just go where the power is; once we have the power they'll come crawling back.)

I want a president who will restore the True Blue Majority I remember from my youth when Dems had enormous seat advantages in both houses of Congress.  There's been a lot of positive talk lately about the example of Lyndon Johnson playing hardball, but Johnson played hardball because he had an adequate number of Democrats to work with.  The 89th Congress was the most lopsided Democratic Congress of the last 70 years, with a 68-32 majority in the Senate and a 295-140 majority in the House.  Yes, you read that right, a 155 seat majority in the House.  Even though some of the Senate Dems were really Dixiecrats, Johnson knew he had moderate Republican Senators like Leverett Saltonstall, Margaret Chase Smith, Everett Dirksen and Jacob Javits to help dilute their oppositional efforts.  All this talk about Johnson kicking @ss needs to be seen in that context.  Norris Cotton, another R Senator who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, switched to vote in favor of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  Even Lyndon Johnson knew when it helped to reach across the aisle.

I just don't understand people who apparently don't know the meaning or the power of hope and would rather stay stuck in a world where talking about hope is fruitless and encouraging people to hope has no value.  I'm not staying stuck there with you.  I'm through with thinking it's cool to be pessimistic and call it realism.  I'm thrilled with the idea of working as hard as I can alongside millions of other people to manifest solid results starting with nothing more than an audacious hope and a candidate with the intelligence and judgment and drive to make that hope a reality for the country in the same way he has done in his own life.  I don't want to be part of any campaign where the time-honored power of hope is laughed at and belittled.  If I accepted that way of thinking I never would have even attempted any of the improbable things I hoped for and manifested in my life.

I've seen hope triumph over the impossible many times in ways big and small.  Hope gave women and blacks the vote.  Hope put a man on the moon.  Hope got me through college and graduate school when my life was falling apart all around me.  Hope founded this country when the British Army was "invincible".  Hope made Oprah one of the richest women in the world.  Hope brought marriage equality to Massachusetts.  Hope is the spark of fire enlivening and empowering every progressive social change in human history.  I'm giving my vote to Obama because his whole life (and Michelle's life) is proof that hope strengthens people to accomplish amazing achievements despite the number of "reasonable" people who think there is no point to holding on to hope.  I'm giving my vote to someone who has a gift for infusing the people around him with that same sense of inspirational hope and spurring them to get deeply involved in the actions that will fulfill that hope.  The rest of you are welcome to entertain various justifications for rejecting that vision as unworkable.  You can have your "healthy" skepticism and your "it hasn't been done yet and I won't believe it can be done until someone actually does it."  Being that cynical is its own punishment, and it's not the way I want to live.