For the week of December 24 - 30, 2003

At the center
there is hope

Commentary by Adam Tanous

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With the rest of the parents of the world, I’ve found myself of late swimming in Christmas narratives, both in print and on film. They are slower, quieter, klunkier productions than we expect these days, especially when it comes to film.

But they are gems: "Frosty the Snowman," "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," "The Little Drummer Boy," and "Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town." They are, remarkably, the very same shows that enthralled my brother and me decades ago. And I have to wonder what it is that so captures 2- and 5-year-olds, whether or not they are separated by a slice of history—wars, cultural revolutions, economic booms—or not?

Many of these films seem to center around the idea of transformation. And that’s transformation on any level you want to take it—whether we’re talking about a snowman coming to life, the self-realization of a reindeer or the transformation of a world by the birth of a child.

It seems to me that transformation—or at least the hope, the potential for it—courses through us on a fundamental level. From conception to birth, child to adult, life to after life, from ignorance to understanding, from an egocentric vision to one of compassion and empathy, from one of hubris to humility. These are all paths we follow or hope to follow in our brief time here. These are perhaps the most basic of our longings, and so course through all of us: Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or atheist.

Still, the more I think about transformation, the more I think there is something even more basic at the center of it. And that is hope. Transformation is just the realization of hope. Hope is a potential, which, at times, seems more vital to us than the realization itself.

There was recently a hearing for the Green River killer, Gary L. Ridgeway, a man convicted of killing 48 women in the Seattle area. The families of the victims were given an opportunity to speak directly to the court and to the murderer. Many of the speakers vented their anger. But if there was a consistent theme it was that what most devastated these people was the fact that their loved ones’ dreams had been taken away. Their plans and hopes for the future were wiped away. And that loss of potential was what was so crushing and painful to the families.

Hope is a miraculous quantity that in a way is the only substance that can move humanity forward. Without it, the world would falter and eventually cease to be. Hope is an energy not of this world in that it obeys no physical laws we know to be true. The amount of hope in the world is not constant. Greater hope in one part of the world does not diminish the hope in another.

This country has been, from its birth, a refuge for the hopeful, a place where transformation was possible. After all, the most basic of all hopes, those of life itself and then liberty, are guaranteed in our Declaration of Independence. And while we’ve done well at keeping that dream alive for the average American, whatever success we’ve had also, I think, on a moral level broadens our responsibilities.

Why? Because there are vast stretches of this world that do not have the guarantee of life or liberty—the very starting points for life in America. And if we believe in the premise of democracy, ultimately, we have to come to the realization that those guarantees belong to all of humanity.

Consider life, for instance. In this country we have certain expectations of health and life expectancy that are different from much of the rest of the world. The devastation created by AIDS threatens to extinguish hope across the continents of Africa and Asia. The United Nations recently reported in its World Health Report that in Sierra Leone 30 percent of all children die before the age of 5. In places like Zimbabwe and Zambia the life expectancy is 37.9 and 39.7 years, respectively. As a frame of reference, life expectancy in Switzerland is 80.6 years and in the U.S. it is 76.9 years.

It is hard to brush aside that kind of disparity. When faced with those figures we have to understand that there will be a similar disparity in hope among those peoples.

Provided you made it past the age of 5, what exactly would you do with your life if you knew you were likely to live no longer than 38 years? Those facts cannot help but skew one’s sense of justice. That one life in one part of the world is, on average, half the length of that in another seems completely alien to our notion of democracy. It is analogous to an African American being considered three-fifths of a person for the purposes of congressional representation, as they were in the early years of this nation.

Granted public health on a global scale is complex and an issue that generates much less political interest in this country than, say, terrorism or the occasional rogue nation. I believe, however, that it is the most important political issue facing us. And by political I mean in its purest sense—beyond the distortions of ego and money—as the aggregate expression of our wants and aspirations.

The very first and last of our aspirations has to be that life, something unpredictable yet lovely, will unfold before us all. That is hope. It is the only true measure of humanity’s success.

 

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