Hope is by nature an expensive commodity… - Thucydides
For the last several months I’ve been totally befuddled by the constant repetition of the “hope and change” mantra that has become the Obama slogan. The words by themselves really signify nothing. What does “hope” stand for? Expectations of a better future perhaps? Experience has taught me that hope is vastly overrated in such a setting. If we want it, then we should go out and make it, rather than waiting around for a glib demagogue selling political snake oil. After all, how can any “leader” know what is best for each and every one of us?
The American Revolution came about not because of hope, but because of how people made it happen. They were willing to fight and die to bring liberty to the land they lived in. If they had relied on “hope,” then we would still be flying the Union Jack, and singing God Save the Queen. Hope is, at bottom line passive and a nation that needs results needs action to bring them about. We need more and better supplies of energy? Throwing government money at the situation won’t do the trick. People have learned long ago that the government is a sucker when it comes to spending, and that it will throw billions of dollars into a bottomless hole where no results are to be found. Tax and spend is not the way. It has a terrible track record and will continue to do so.
If, as Michelle Obama says, Hope is making a comeback, then I am extremely sorry to hear it. I was hoping that free will and Yankee ingenuity, which have been stifled for so long by government would be making a comeback. I’ve never known hope to be a major factor in American public life. The will to achieve, to fight, to win and to find the answers, were what I believe were the defining characteristics we had, and need now in ever greater amounts. Without them hope is just a platitude; a word without any significant meaning. It is something we resort to when we have nothing left; not even a belief in our own abilities.
Thucydides, the Greek historian had this to say about hope:
“Hope is by nature an expensive commodity, and those who are risking their all on one cast find out what it means only when they are already ruined; it never fails them in the period when such a knowledge would enable them to take precautions. Do not let this happen to you, you who are weak and depend on a single movement of the scale. And do not be like those people who, as so commonly happens, miss the chance of saving themselves in a human and practical way, and, when every clear and distinct hope has left them in their adversity, turn to what is blind and vague, to prophecies and oracles and such things which by encouraging hope lead men to ruin." *
The empty prophecies of Senator Obama that he can save the world from itself, are empty ones, and will likely lead to the ruin, not only of those who listen to him, but to millions of others as well; others who knew better but could not persuade the masses who cared not for the “human and practical way” and opted instead for empty promises by one who could not fulfill them.
Those dead white men were not fools. Perhaps that is why modern educators don’t want us to read them any more.
*This excerpt is from Readings in the Classical Historians; Michael Grant, ed., p. 92; Macmillan Publishing Co., 1992
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