Substance of hope for 2009

A new year is coming, and it is hard to be optimistic when “everyone” is saying that the economy will get worse before it gets better. I guess you could put a positive spin on it by saying that we are closer to the end of the recession than we were six months ago. Of course, we are closer to a lot of things: springtime, the end of our lives, being eligible for social security if we aren’t already there. Much of what I know about the future is bad, so I have decided to focus on how little I actually know.

The news that is covered by the media is the stuff that is so big that you can’t miss it, but only a tiny percentage of what is happening is covered, not even close to one percent. Keeping up with the news, while important for good citizenship, is like walking through the woods, encountering two deer and assuming that nothing else is living there because you didn’t see it.

I know that most of what will happen in 2009 is hidden from me, and I am going to trust that a lot of it is good. People are out there doing all kinds of good and useful things I will never know about. They are doing some bad things, too. Bernard Madoff has been running a fraud for years, but no one called him on it until people had lost billions. Now he is on the front page; when he and his investors were funneling money to charities, he was barely news at all.

Here are some reasons I am going to be hopeful about 2009. All over the world there are thousands of little environmental organizations at work. They are small and seem not to have much power, but it adds up over time. A lot of movements started out this way. How many women were pressing to get the vote for women? Not that many in sheer numbers. You could have looked at the “movement” and would have been completely justified in thinking this was never going to happen, but it did.

I grew up in North Carolina. If you had told me people would not be allowed to smoke in public places, I would have told you how wrong you were. Never going to happen. How wrong I was. You may not be able to move a mountain with a teaspoon, but you get a million teaspoons, and you just might be able to do it. It adds up.

Another source of hope is young people. They got their faults. They seem to think cell phones are a part of the human body like hands and feet. That is beyond irritating. I don’t get the tattoos and body piercing. They have a lot to learn about most everything, but they have made friends across practically every known human barrier. They have a sense of the sacred even if fewer of them are members of organized religious groups. If given a little encouragement, I think they are going to do a credible job of shaping history in good ways. They’ve got a lot of electronic gizmos, but otherwise they are the most financially disadvantaged generation in a long time: more debt, fewer job options, lower salaries, higher rents. They have been seen more as a group to sell things to than as the next generation needing help to get started in life.  Somehow I think they will prevail, however.

My final source of hope comes from the enormous creativity that is unleashed in bad times. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t like hard times. I like comfort and easy happiness as well as the next person. If you tell me a comfortable life is behind door #1, and a difficult but creative life is behind door #2, I would choose door #1. But if I can’t choose, and door #2 is the only door, it helps to remind myself how much good can be unleashed in the middle of extraordinary challenges. Great art, literature, music, technological advances can come when humanity is living on the edge. The new year may push us hard. I hope if it does, a strength, compassion and inventiveness that we didn’t even know we had rises to the surface.

Patricia Hunt, of Staunton, is a chaplain at Mary Baldwin College.