(aired on NPR's Morning Edition November 10, 2008)

Ancient Greece gave us the myth of Pandora’s Box.  Forbidden to be opened, but opened anyway, the box spewed out a torrent of plagues to torture people forever.  Pandora slammed the lid back down trying to trap the worst of it, but only one thing remained there at the bottom - hope.

Montage: I think it’s hope just to live because I mean it’s hope just to think that the next second is even going to happen… You believe something can happen and you have to have a positive attitude about what you believe… Hope is kind of exactly like faith to me.  I think human beings need it to just be able to keep going.

That’s Caitlin Grey, Raven-Simone Atkins, and Quincy Mosby adding their voices to a 1000 year debate about whether hope was the best thing Pandora's box had to offer … or the worst.  Now Barack Obama promises hope and we’re wondering the same thing.

It’s young people like me who are promised hope the most.  Our teachers, they tell us we can go to the best schools, and our parents tell us that we can be whatever we want.  Most of my peers say yeh, it’s their mom’s who fill them with the most hope.  For 18 year-old Rynesha Snowden, it was her great-grandmother…

Rynesha Snowden:  She was kind-of my hope.  She had rules and she was strict and but you know she showed that love and she showed how much she cared about people.  and I always was like, ooh I’m going to start crying…(crying)…but she was strong and I want to be like her.

Strong hopeful leaders can be huge inspirations and help us improve our lives.  But the hope that adults push onto us isn’t always realistic. Like when people have told me and my friends that getting a job would keep us out of trouble, we believed in the hope that someone somewhere would hire us. When some of us got turned down time after time, application after application, we lost hope in the possibility of getting a legal job and in the people who preached to us it was possible. Quincy Mosby is 22 years-old and his mom used to fill him with hope.

Quincy Mosby:  I remember when, when I was very young you know.  We just were in a bad spot you know, barely could keep the lights on, my dad wasn’t around anymore, and ahh, I think she gave me hope, but it was strange cause I think she believed in me more in me than she believed in herself.  Like she would tell me to go put my hand on the refrigerator and pray for food to come  But the older I got, the harder it became to believe in that type of stuff.

Dr. Spiegel:  If hope get’s too far off the mark then it becomes fantasy and it’s more likely to hurt you than help you.

That’s Dr. David Spiegel, a Stanford psychiatrist who researches cancer patients and the role of the mind when it comes to healing the body.

Dr. Spiegel:  If you have too much concrete believe that your hope is going to change everything, then when things don’t go the way you hope, who do you have to blame, you blame yourself.  One of my cancer patients started to cry and her husband said don’t cry you’ll make the cancer spread.   It’s not that you have bad cancer, it’s that you didn’t hope enough or you didn’t hope right.  I think what makes hope work is when it’s realistic.  Or when the person who’s promising you something is genuine about trying to deliver it.

Barack Obama inspired me, and for the first time ever I voted, with a belief that our country and my life could change.  His promise sits like a weight on his shoulders, but the most challenging thing for all voters and young people like me to remember, is that it sits just as heavy on our own.

For NPR News, I’m Orlando Campbell

TAPE: (Barack Obama from Iowa Caucus Victory Speech)  Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it. (fade out on applause)

Web Extra
Christine Carter Ph.D. is a sociologist and executive director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley which studies happiness, compassion, and altruism.


Dr. Peter Ubel is a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan who lead a research study following permanent and reversible colostomy patients. The study found that the patients with permanent colostomies have significantly higher life satisfaction than those with reversible colostomies, suggesting that hope might be counterproductive in some circumstances.


Sylvia Boorstein Ph.D is a psychologist, author, and an instructor at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin County, CA.



Links
Resurgence Of Hope
Obama's election brings new hope

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