A Woman Called Hope

I side, reflexively and all the time, with the little guy. Unions. Blue Collar people generally. The Poor. Minorities. The desperate. The doomed. The outcast. That little old lady you see pushing a shopping cart full of garbage outside Starbucks? She's your sister. What can you do to help her? The fact that she's talking to people who aren't there means she needs help. How can we make America a place where she is overwhelmed with gratitude at the help that follows her around, ready to catch her if she stumbles?

The soldier returning from war, unable to escape the terrible knowledge that what he has seen has shown him the damnable lies that our country tells itself in order to enable men to do things that will haunt them forever? The one who wakes up downstairs, halfway out the front door, because he heard an explosion in his dream and is now warning buddies who aren't there that they are about to die and his wife doesn't understand but tries to be there for him any way she can, but at the same time she's worried for the children? What can you do to help them? They are your brother and sister. How can we make America a place where they are overwhelmed with gratitude at the help that follows them around, ready to catch them if they stumble?

The man, now 45, who suffers from nightmares and flashbacks from growing up in a neighborhood where he went to sleep many nights to the sound of gunfire; where he lost precious, priceless, irreplaceable friends to random murders, and is not sure he can handle one more fucking senseless death? How can we make America a place where he is overwhelmed with gratitude at the help that follows him around, ready to catch him if he stumbles?

The woman whose actual first name is Hope. The one who wakes up every morning and, if she's lucky, has a few moments of peace before she remembers that both of her precious grandchildren were murdered; before she remembers that losing the first one was hard, but staring into another grandson's coffin almost exactly a year later -- that that was the beginning of the desolation and crushing grief that robs her daily of the rightful, well-earned joy of being a grandparent. She spends her free time ministering to the kids in the neighborhood, doing what she can to reach them before the gangs or police do. The ones she loses to murder she prays for; the ones in prison she visits and writes to. She is a saint. She needs your help.

How can we make America a place where she is overwhelmed with gratitude at the help that follows her around, ready to catch her if she stumbles?

America has become a scary place in the last 30 years. How can we make America a place filled with people who are overwhelmed with gratitude at the help that follows them around, ready to catch us if we stumble?