Hope

The one thing I remember about hope is not to ever lose it. It's like your heartbeat or the breath in your body; if you lose it, you die.

That beacon can be dimly lit at times given that human beings are the most wretched creatures God ever saw fit to place on this orbiting rock. It's hard to see hope when you pass the stench of urine and feces on city streets, an alleyway where homeless humans abide. They don't live. They lost hope. You can see it in their eyes, and if you hear their voice at all, you can hear it in that, too. Hope is lost for them. They did the thing you're not supposed to do, and they allowed it to slip through their fingers like water. No, like air. Yes, air is easier to hold than hope.

Psychiatry has become a billion dollar profession because humans have forgotten that there are reasons for every condition. If you're depressed, there is likely a reason. Thin though it may be, dim, hard to see, even in good light, there is always a reason. Childhood trauma can be the reason, heredity, teen-aged bullies and bad parents are all valid reasons for depression, or perhaps, just maybe, someone forgot to tell them never to lose hope.

God! It's so frustrating to see the problem and not ever be able to convey it to anyone else because they're so steeped in denial that they refuse to acknowledge the one thing that can save their life. Life. Oh yes, there's that word again. Life.

One can exist, you know, like the homeless humans under the bridge; living in squalor like a lot of trolls, eating whatever refuse is left behind Burger King, or standing on street corners with a hand-written cardboard sign. One can, I suppose, get a meal, get a drink, maybe find a warm corner to rest on a really cold night. That's not life. That's not even as good as a wild animal has it. That is just moving from day to day hoping you don't die, but you're not certain why you don't want to die. You just exist. You just want to wake up the next day so you can be miserable some more, and it's ALWAYS someone else's fault.

Hope. You've lost hope. It still exists, but it's not hiding at the end of a blunt. It's not hiding at the bottom of a bottle. It isn't hiding in a pill or a new therapist. No, you've lost the one thing that nobody else can give you. You were born with it, it's part of you, and it's a part you suppressed because you believe you can't have it.

The truth is, you can't actually get rid of hope permanently. It's hidden well for those trolls under the bridge and in the sewage-smelling alleyway, and in the homeless shelters and asylums and prisons, flophouses and brothels. However, you cannot kill what you did not create, but you can find it, and you can make it grow.

It's exhausting to look out into the world and see the intimate focus on who the next president of the United States is going to be when the Queen of England maintains her reign after almost 70 years. Americans are so worried about the Democrats and the Republicans that we are shunning hope with both hands, and turning our backs on each other. It's frustrating to look out at that world, knowing full well that political ridiculousness is why this country was founded, that religious and political persecution incited an extremely uncivilized war between revolutionists and their monarch, and eventually led to the formation of an entirely new way of life.

America has been the envy of most of the world for several hundred years. Now, we are the mockery of even the under-developed parts. Now, while we are badgering each other on social media over how we should and should not conduct an impeachment of an individual who is not even our country's president anymore, there are other countries watching for our downfall. What we have made front page news, is Jerry Springer type entertainment for humans who are just looking for their next meal. They wipe their backsides with those pages of what we've deemed more important than taking care of our own children and elderly.

When all the little things in life, like hope, are lost to us and we stop turning to the one thing that can save us, that's when we stop living and start existing just because we don't want to die.

We sit here in our warm homes and drink water from our tap while we pay taxes on that water, while we pay taxes on our income and on our expenses, and report to our government every penny we earn, save and spend, and we judge the trolls living under bridges for not taking a shower and smelling like body odor and urine. We slam others on social media with ingenuine memes we saved to our thousand-dollar phones, and in the back of our heads we have the nerve to be appalled if someone's opinion differs from our own.

Humans who are engineered to have the capacity to control ourselves also cling to bitterness like it's what keeps the clock ticking. We are supposed to be evolutionarily advanced, yet, kittens can hold a grudge if they're thwarted. Where is the higher lifeform when someone sleeps with your partner? Did you forget? Your partner had a hand in that, too. At the end of the day, is that more important than the fact you were flirting with your boss in a private conversation on Snapchat a few weeks back? You were so happy that the conversation vanished within a few seconds because your husband used your phone to order Bite Squad and opened your Snapchat out of curiosity. Meanwhile, a child who lives in an abandoned house with her unemployed, drug-addicted mother will go to bed hungry tonight because her mother got paid for prostituting herself, and used the money for a fix and passed out instead of buying her baby food. That little girl will grow up. She will grow up without hope, and know nothing but bitterness, but let's dwell on the fact that your husband had an affair, okay? That will certainly keep hope hidden in that box we've put it in; honestly, I don't know how it ever sees the light of day.

We dwell on our religions and our freedoms, while pressing others who don't engage in similar conversations for being stupid, ignorant and uninformed. Christians believe in an invisible God who may or may not have inspired the penning of the most widely published book in the history of humanity, and a savior who was the world's first zombie. No, I'm not being disrespectful. I believe in all of that, too, along with the resurrection of the son of God and the utterly unbelievable miracles he performed in his time walking among us. Yes, but at the same time, I'm not going to point my finger and tell another human being to believe in my invisible God, and burn them if they don't. We all have choices to make. I choose hope.

Instead of turning a blind eye when I walk past the homeless person, I want to see what makes them void of hope. I want to know but they won't tell me. They are the embodiment of that child whose mother chose poorly. They are the adult version of the baby whose mother tried to abort, but couldn't, then regretted her choice later and left the baby in a dumpster. That story was on the front page of the newspaper, because humans WANT to read that. Humans WANT to know that someone is worse off than they are. What is WRONG with us? We are so sick. We don't trust each other. We have lost hope. We have lost faith. We have lost insight into each other and we don't care to learn anymore. Are we doomed? Yeah, probably.

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