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What Have We Done to Hope?

Of all the phrases flowing from the US presidential election race back in 2008, "the audacity of hope", was the most troubling because it is a reflection of our growing moral poverty - not the poverty the poor struggle with every day.

Set aside the eloquence of the phrase noted above and you're left with a very troubling question. How is it that we've arrived at a place where it's considered audacious for the poor to have hope?

Hope is humanity's birthright and not the property of a media-savvy phrase crafted for a news sound bite. In essence, hope is the inalienable right. Yet somehow it's become acceptable to say, for example, that the poor are audacious simply because they choose to be hopeful amidst their circumstances.

The fact that the phrase,"the audacity of hope", resonates with so many of us is a reflection of our growing intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and moral poverty.

No person, especially the poor, should have to be audacious in thought or action just to reclaim something that was theirs all along – hope. Despite their circumstances, the poor are able to find hope in ways you or I can't even imagine, in a setting where we could never survive - not even for a day.

A young mother finds hope when her family is able to have two meals in one day, rather than just one – despite the fact that both meals are incredibly meager by our standards and would scarcely feed one adult here.

A father, exhausted from a long day of  backbreaking labor, finds hope in the shoots of grain breaking through the sun-baked earth of his small vegetable garden.

A child finds hope when she is able to sleep through the night because the sickness that racks her tiny body has left, even if only for one night.

Friend, I worry that we are slowly, perhaps unwittingly, absolving ourselves of our responsibility to guard and cherish what it means to be a member of humanity’s family.

I worry about what we have we done to hope and our willingness to let a cleverly crafted phrase redefine, for completely self-serving purposes, the fundamental truth about hope.

Friend, we need to avoid the moral bankruptcy that would allow us to characterize the poor as audacious simply because they have the courage to find and claim the hope that is their birthright as much as it is ours.

David S. McKenzie, International President
HOPE International Development Agency