Hope Will Return

Spring is coming, and with it the annual sense of renewal – for us and the world.  The problem is that we all too frequently look at what’s going on around us and don’t like much of what we see – poverty, selfishness, rampant consumerism, a distant government, even a frustrating dysfunction in our own communities.In his book The Art of the Impossible, Vaclav Havel makes some telling observations on where the true fault lies for much of our collective malaise.  In a word, it is us.  We all too frequently accept the troubled world as it is, waiting for others to solve our problems, instead of understanding that we are the present world’s caretakers and bear much responsibility for the current troubles.  We must work on ourselves - how we think, how we resolve conflict, how we forgive.  Some of Havel’s insights are helpful to us – a kind of call to a collective repentance:Are we implicit in the system that enslaves us – or are we what we always wanted to believe of ourselves?  Can we change the course of our history by changing ourselves?Can we find a new way of governing that allows us to move forward, to bring politics to a deeper level to engage our whole beings and to save our civilization from its collective hubris?  None of us is just its victim; we are also its co-creators.  This wasn’t something bequeathed to us by some aging relative.  On the contrary, we must accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves.  If we accept that, we will understand that it is now up to us.Let us make no mistake: the best government in the world, the best parliament, and the best president in the world cannot achieve much on their own.  And it would be wrong to expect a general remedy to come from them alone.  Freedom and democracy require participation and therefore responsible action from us all.  If we recognize this, then all the horrors that we face are not so real.  If we realize this, hope will return to our hearts.