What Is Hope?
Hope; it’s a sweet, comforting word isn’t it? An inspiring word; a word that puts us at ease with the knowledge that if we just have hope, we can get through just about anything, right?
We offer up hope to people who are having a hard time with their health, or maybe their financial situation, trying to get them to believe in hope, once again, themselves.
We ask friends what their hopes for their futures are, and expect to hear them bring up good plans and ideas that will help them fully enjoy their lives. It’s a good conversation starter that some people would say will lead to a nice, productive relationship with friends. Of course, we hope that our friends get what they seek.
Hope is also a motivating word, isn’t it? I mean we will, with hope, face situations, and sometimes really big, threatening situations, head-on, that just a short time before, caused us to feel insecure, frightened and powerless. Hope sparks our will to make things better and our resolve to see it through to the end.
When we speak of people who are living their “hopes and dreams,” we are speaking of people who enjoy a life of freedom. People who aren’t free to live their lives as they see fit, never have hopes and dreams, because there aren’t any reasons they should expect improvements in life, as long as someone else controls their lives.
About the only thing people who aren’t free can hope for, is the death of their dictator. While hoping for a dictator’s death may not be what most of us think of as “hope,” since it’s so negative, if you can picture yourself living with no freedom under such conditions, you likely wouldn’t feel it was a bad thought at all.
Consider all of the people who have lived their lives throughout history while enslaved. And then consider that they were enslaved by a mean, tyrannical slave owner. We would think that such slaves would be well within their right to hope for their “master’s” demise.
Unfortunately, however, bad people do have hopes too. They are nasty, sickening, repulsively unfair hopes, but hopes nonetheless. They hope for more power. More wealth. These are really the only “hopes” such poor examples of humanity feel are important to their lives, as only their lives matter.
Can any of us even imagine what kind of person wishes and hopes to become a dictator? To actually have as your main desire, to control masses of people in ways that offers them no freedom or hope whatsoever to live life as they see fit? What kind of worthless human trash seeks such a position of underhanded, corrupt power?
Maybe a better question is, why are we, who are still free, doing nothing to help those enslaved by tyrants? Why do we have trade deals with countries who are controlled by such brutal tyrants? I’m being serious here.
Maybe we aren't as free as we thought?
What rabbit hole did we go down and when, that caused us - supposedly free people - to entertain the whims of the worst dictators the world has ever known, and reward them with trade agreements? Shouldn’t we be doing everything we can to thwart their brutal governance and abuse of people and get them out of power?
During the late 1990s, (1998, I believe), the American government made China their PERMANENT Most Favored Trade Partner. Can anyone provide a good, fair and ethical reason why the American government would do that? The answer is, there isn’t a good, logical reason for it, nor could there be. EVER. They are our sworn enemies.
They’re also the biggest enemy of freedom in the world. So why is everyone in most of the free world governments so accommodating to the Chinese Communist Party? While at the same time, doing all they can to restrict OUR rights?
Why were high-level Nazis brought to America at the end of WWII in a secret operation called “Operation Paperclip?” Had we already, at that time, gone bad? Whose “hopes” were fulfilled with this move by the American government in the late 1940s?
Operation Paperclip’s moves certainly represented “hopes” that, whoever these rotten people were, made their day. They were evil hopes because these are some of the most evil people who’ve ever lived. And what may be most shocking, is the fact that there have been people with the same evil hopes for humanity, in our government ever since.
I HOPE, with all the hope in the world, that their time is up… finally.
What Is Hope? © free-reign 2020
I've written this piece as I was inspired by a prompt that I received in a daily email from 
Thanks for reading!
Sources for images used in this post:
(Public Domain photos are from Wikimedia Commons)
Prospects: Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Hope: Image by Pixabay
Charlie Chaplin, The Dictator: Trailer screenshot / Public domain
