Move over Obama. Last night at the movie theatre I discovered that talking about hope from the political stage had been going on before you or I had thought of it. Back in the 1970’s Harvey Milk, the first gay man elected to political office in San Francisco was making speeches that repeated the word hope over and over. Of course, like you Obama, he was using the noun in the positive context, attributing each hope to a person or a group of people. . This stands in sharp contrast to the way the noun is so often used in the medical literature, usually in a negative form, attributed to the possibility of cure from a dreaded disease, dissociated from the person or people who would hold the hope.
Milk was assassinated. I was greatly relieved to learn that his assassination was not sparked by his talk about hope.
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