We live in an increasingly multicultural and multiethnic society. Our world community is getting smaller with distinctions and boundaries blurring. It is a time of increasing violence, poverty, corruption, and threats to democracy. Humanity is challenged, hope is challenged. Reality can give rise to fear, but can also give grounds for hope.
I would like to explore hope through several postings. And depending upon how these postings unfold, perhaps explore hope’s close companions: possibility and opportunity.
Bill Moyers, in an interview with author Luis Urrea, discusses Urrea’s work and writings of the people living on the borderland between the US and Mexico (Moyers & Urrea, 2012). Many of these people live in hopeless circumstances. They are born in garbage dumps, work their entire life picking up garbage, and eventually die and are buried in a dump. Moyers asked Urrea, “These are the lost and depraved of the world and you deliberately chose to write about them. You describe them as sleeping in boxes, picking up trash, eating the dead dogs, selling their bodies. What are they like? Who are they?” Urrea replied, “I love them, they’re my friends. They’re people. I’m there by the grace of God.” Later in the interview Moyers asks again about the hopeless state of these people Urrea writes about. Urrea responds,
The whole point of this is hope. When hope ends, your life ends. So hopelessness is the struggle. It’s not hunger, it’s not poverty, it’s the hopelessness.
Hope may be our greatest hope as we confront the twenty-first century of converging crises, and opportunity.
Reference
Moyers, B. & Urrea, L.A. (2012). Between two worlds: Life on the border. Retrieved from http://billmoyers.com