I sat down with my coffee and flipped on the morning news. “And finally this,” I heard, “from a new [media organization(s) redacted] survey: Only 40 percent of Americans feel hopeful about the coming year.”
Really? I clicked off the TV. No way to start my day or end my year. More bad news. Sometimes I think these surveys are rigged in order to get the most negative results.
I was still brooding over the survey results while I walked Millie. I thought things were getting better. But not lately, I guess. There was a fierce storm called Sandy (why do we have to give them names?) and the ensuing human tragedy and massive damage. There was the bloodbath at Sandy Hook Elementary, a primal shock that still hasn’t worn off. Our political parties are at perpetual loggerheads and nobody can explain the weather.
No wonder there’s a dearth of hope.
What is hope, exactly? What is it that people are supposedly not feeling? I looked down at Millie. She was certainly a hopeful creature. Hopeful I will serve her breakfast soon. Hopeful I will play with her. Hopeful I will let her up on the couch with me (even if she will eventually hog all the room). Hopeful about things that are likely to happen.
Maybe, I decided, hope is like a commodity, a precious resource. We don’t necessarily expend it needlessly. We are careful with it. Prudent in our hoping. We don’t want to squander hope. These have been a tough few months and people are understandably holding back, perhaps a little gun-shy with their hope at the present moment. Maybe that accounted for the survey results. Or maybe it was just the dying daylight and long, cold nights.
Back inside my apartment, my obligations to Millie dutifully discharged, I checked out a news site (I can’t stay away from the news no matter how hard I try). One of the lead pieces referred to a tweet sent out by NBC News’s Ann Curry urging her social media followers to do 26 acts of kindness in honor of the 26 Sandy Hook victims—26 good acts to counteract 26 murderous acts, a kind of karmic answer to evil. Ann’s inspiration had gone totally viral.
In the two weeks since her tweet, all over the world, people are doing 26 random acts of kindness. There has been an outpouring of concern for Newtown, Connecticut, of course, and people have given that wounded community their support. But Ann’s Twitter request has morphed into something far more elemental. People are committing themselves to doing good acts for anyone they can, often anonymously.
I read about a woman in O’Fallon, Illinois, Rebecca Brogan, who volunteered an afternoon at the animal shelter because she read that one of the school shooting victims loved animals. She also wrote a letter to a prisoner and brought burgers to a group of homeless men. Simple, decent, good acts. Her twenty-sixth act will be to get 26 other people to join her.
And Rebecca is merely one of tens of thousands of individuals and businesses committing themselves to 26 acts. Survey or no survey, I couldn’t help wondering if I had ever heard of anything quite as hopeful as Ann’s tweet. I mean, what could be more powerful than a simple act of kindness? What could be a more fundamental expression of faith in our basic decency as a race? Good and evil are the hemispheres of human nature. One can overpower the other. It’s a choice we make.
I think most people choose the good, and that is a compelling reason for hope. Hope is the belief that tomorrow can be better than today, that the future holds more joy than pain. The year 2013 is nearly here. How do you choose to feel about it?
And if you really want to warm your heart, Ann is retweeting many of the #26Acts responses she’s gotten (@AnnCurry). Check them out. It’s the best reading I’ve done in a long while. And lest you think we at Guideposts didn’t know what a good soul Ann Curry is, she was on our cover in March 2010. And happy New Year to all of you.
