- News headlines focus on despair and pain
- Individual good deeds remind us of hope’s ability to produce real change
- We must keep hope alive and fight for better lives for the suffering
https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/does-hope-spring-eternal-christmas-note
Does hope spring eternal?
Reading time: 12 min
It is easy to become dismayed by the scale of suffering in the world – but small acts of hope change people’s lives for the better every day.
In a nutshell
- News headlines focus on despair and pain
- Individual good deeds remind us of hope’s ability to produce real change
- We must keep hope alive and fight for better lives for the suffering
It may not be a pleasant task, but it is much easier to write about the bleak outlook and horrific suffering of so many, rather than looking for, and writing about, signs of hope. But as we approach the age-old, uplifting celebrations of Christmas and the dawn of a new year, that is the task set for me by the editors of GIS. In setting me that task I suppose they are at one with Pandora, who said that the one thing left in her famous box, when all else was lost, was hope. Pandora’s name can be interpreted as “all-gifted” or “all-giving” – a clue about how the sentiment of hope can be turned into something tangible, life-giving and lifesaving.
Hal Lindsey, an American writer and broadcaster, put it this way: “Man can live about forty days without food, about three days without water, about eight minutes without air … but only for one second without hope.” There is a connection between hope and tangible acts, one that can be found in countless, abundant and generous unreported small deeds. It is a connection beautifully illustrated in the story of a young woman called Efa, and some of her friends.
Channeling anger into positive action
The story begins with the tragic death last September of six children and a pregnant woman who, with four other people, died after a small boat carrying dozens of fleeing refugees sank off the French coast. In October, four more people, including a two-year-old boy, also went to their deaths, joining dozens drowned this year in the seas around Great Britain. Perilous journeys begin in places like Sudan (with 12 million people displaced, mainly by war). If they make it to the Mediterranean, they may end up adding to the 1,983 fatalities recorded this year by the International Organization for Migration.
Efa and some student friends became angry at the number of drownings. Instead of simply being angry, they decided to enlist in a charity, Atlantic Pacific International Rescue, based in Wales. The charity provides rescue lifeboats, crew and training programs. It has been involved in many life-saving missions, for instance the rescue of 32 people, including a baby and three unaccompanied minors, from an unseaworthy rubber boat.
Currently, there are 120 million people displaced worldwide. Yes, we need political answers to root causes, and serious commitment to breaking up the criminal gangs involved. But in the meantime, Efa’s example should shame and spur us into action. Individual actions like hers are undoubtedly the key to the transformation of our lives – personally and collectively. These individual deeds create a better world, and are based on engagement and participation rather than protest and complaint. They can also become contagious, encouraging others to replace “I” and “me” with “us” and “you.” And there are more Efas than you might imagine.
Generous hearts create real change
In the United Kingdom, 67 percent of the public gave to charity in 2023, raising an estimated GBP 13.9 billion – an increase of 9 percent from 2022 – with some of the country’s poorest areas among the most generous donors. An encouraging 75 percent of British adults undertook at least one charitable activity, whether it was donating, volunteering or sponsoring. We need to hear more in our media about this generosity and altruism, these neglected hopeful signs, rather than the deluge of negativity and complaints which can so easily turn us into a nation of Eeyores – A. A. Milne’s beloved and depressed donkey in the stories of Winnie the Pooh.
Eeyore’s life is beset by gloomy worries and little obstacles that become disproportionate when he feels confronted by seemingly insoluble problems. When my own children were young, I told them not to become Eeyores and invented some stories for them about two families: the “poor me’s” and the “can do’s.” They had to choose which type of people they wanted to belong to. It is about seeing the glass as half empty or half full. Of course, some of life’s challenges really are off the Richter scale. But, even in seemingly hopeless situations, searching for solutions – or at least better options – can engender hope where there was only despair.
Think of the modern hospice movement – founded in 1967 in the UK by an illustrious English woman, Dame Cicely Saunders. Anyone familiar with the work of hospices will know how many people have been given comfort, help and hope while coming to terms with the finite nature of our existence. There are now over 200 hospices in the UK along with two national palliative care charities, Marie Curie and Sue Ryder, providing care for people with life-limiting or terminal conditions, along with bereavement support for some 40,000 people.
Central to that movement were Sue Ryder (Baroness Ryder of Warsaw) and her husband, Group Captain (Lord) Leonard Cheshire – two of the greatest people I have ever had the privilege to meet. Both could easily have given up on hope. Both had seen terrible tragedy during their wartime service. Leonard was highly decorated for his courage and bravery as an airman. He saw many of his comrades and close friends killed in action. But he was also an eyewitness to an epoch-defining moment that claimed between 60,000 and 100,000 lives.
Facts & figures
Donations to charities by the British public
Toward the end of World War II, he was sent as one of two British observers of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. He said, “with such utter devastation before our eyes, how imperative to do something to see that it should never happen again.” Where many of us would have despaired, Lord Cheshire “did something,” believing that even out of such horror, there had to be some expression of hope for humanity. In Lord Cheshire’s case, it was the founding of a nursing home.
His home, set up in a country house, would care for people with disabilities, some maimed in the war, and some with terminal illness. Now, 70 years later, Leonard Cheshire Disability has grown into a global charity with 140 homes and services in the UK and more than 250 Cheshire Homes and services in 55 countries worldwide.
Baroness Ryder, who had worked in British Intelligence during the war, had also witnessed great suffering and loss. At the war’s conclusion, she too saw great need and determined to devote herself to charitable work. She started with truckloads of aid, taking them into post-war Europe – beginning a lifelong love of Poland – and brought survivors from the concentration camps who were sick and needed long-term nursing back to the UK. This effort grew into a network of homes providing care for people with palliative and neurological conditions – with 3,000 staff across healthcare and other services, over 6,000 dedicated volunteers, and seven hospices and palliative care hubs.
The message is that small, good deeds – whether it is Efa and her friends finding ways to rescue a refugee in danger of drowning, or the founder of a charity, or a volunteer at a hospice offering an alternative to the lethal injection of the euthanasia practitioner – give society both hope and definition. And this is not a new discovery: The ancients knew it too.
Great nations were built on philanthropy
Aristotle held that “Hope is a vigorous principle; it is furnished with light and heat to advise and execute; it sets the head and heart to work and animates a man to do his utmost. And thus, by perpetually pushing and assurance, it puts a difficulty out of countenance, and makes a seeming impossibility give way.” In other words, becoming agents for change, changes us and changes society.
In the 1830s, on visiting America, Alexis de Tocqueville believed that the country’s greatness was being built on hopeful foundations embodied by everyone’s participation and involvement, harnessing goodness and giving, driven by voluntary associations and philanthropy. The likeminded British statesman, Edmund Burke, saw “little platoons” of active citizens as the hopeful signs of a good and decent society.
In our own times, that same zeal, that same hope, is perhaps best represented in the UK by the establishment of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). The alliance celebrates rather than denigrates the remarkable achievements of the nation, keeping our heritage alive and telling our national story. Telling stories that engender hope is a task undertaken in many societies (and for that matter, in communities and families too) by the elders – in Ireland for instance, by the Shannike, the storyteller. Knowing your story – both good and ill – is intrinsic to identity and disposition. We can too easily forget or disown our stories, or become too one-sided in condemning those who came before us and ignorant of things of which we should be proud.
Facts & figures
Relationship between acts of altruism and life satisfaction
I like the way in which the ARC looks for the hopeful signs in the UK – from constitutional restraints to democratic engagement, from the decline in infant mortality to the many improvements in our standards of living. It also looks to ways in which the UK can reenergize its national life and institutions, understanding that healthy institutions lay the groundwork for prosperity. Even societies caught in the vicelike grip of prejudice, oppression or dictatorship – some suffering terrible persecution – produce people who refuse to be crushed and whose example of endurance sparks embers of hope, keeping alive dreams of a better future.
I think of the “tank man,” who in Tiananmen Square defiantly and courageously stood in front of the armed might of the Chinese Communist Party. I think of Zhang Zhan, the young woman citizen journalist jailed in Wuhan for shining a light on the origins of Covid-19. I think of Jimmy Lai, the publisher of Hong Kong’s now banned Apple Daily, who even in imprisonment keeps alive the dream of freedom and democracy in what was once one of Asia’s greatest cities. The message from his prison cell is that you must continue to hope. That hope springs eternal.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the American civil rights movement sought to end racial discrimination and segregation in the United States. In the 1970s and 1980s, South Africans struggled against apartheid. These seemed like battles that would only be won in generations to come. Yet, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who faced much defeat and discouragement and who in 1968 would lose his life in that struggle, never gave up on hope: “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope. … Let your hopes, not your hurts, shape your future.” Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison during the fight against apartheid (which ended in 1994) also knew that hope is crucial when fighting oppression: “Remember that hope is a powerful weapon even when all else is lost.”
In 1981, Ronald Reagan, in the face of Soviet and communist terror, told the people of America: “Let the light of millions of candles in American homes give notice that the light of freedom is not going to be extinguished.” At the time, it didn’t feel as if the Berlin Wall was about to collapse – but just eight years later, it did.
I recently visited the House of Terror in Budapest, which was where the Arrow Cross Party (the Hungarian Nazis) and then the Stalinist Hungarian Communist Party’s Secret Police, successively, had their headquarters: two sides of one coin. You can visit the cell where Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty was tortured, a man who, along with thousands of others, said no to the dictatorships of both Nazism and communism. After years in prison and then confined for 15 more years to the relative safety of the U.S. Embassy in Budapest, the Cardinal was finally allowed to leave the country. Throughout that time, he maintained a sense of hope. He never collaborated, appeased or made secret pacts and accommodations, always resolute that one day the tyranny would end.
Hope keeps the fight for freedom alive
In the struggle for freedom, much like the 10 brave Catholic bishops who are incarcerated, detained or disappeared in today’s communist China, Cardinal Mindszenty became a national and international symbol of resistance to communism: a beacon of hope. In 1974, his memoirs were published (coincidentally when the first volume of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” also appeared in English). To this day these two declarations remain a source of hope in a darkened world.
They paved the way for the heroism of Wojtyla, Havel, Walesa, Tokes and countless other nameless men and women who refused to abandon hope, activating their belief in providence into concrete efforts and wise deeds to usher in the freedoms still denied to vast numbers of people in dictatorships like China, North Korea and Iran.
And in places like Ukraine, where life has been made a living hell, it is a Russian who reminds us that hell itself is the place where hope has ceased to exist. Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote that: “Totally without hope, one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante’s Hell is the inscription: ‘leave behind all hope, you who enter here.’ ”
Despots like Russian President Vladimir Putin can bomb, terrorize and blackmail, but such tyranny meets its match whenever people dare to hope. Dictators and oppressors should never forget that – just ask Bashar al-Assad.
