WISDOM FROM SAMANTHA NUT, FOUNDER OF WARCHILD

The fact that it failed doesn’t prove that it wasn’t worth doing. If it’s hard to do, it’s probably important. The person getting in the way of your success may be you. There is never a complete loss of opportunity for change, though there may be a paralysis of our willingness to try.

REMEMBERING PETER LOUGHEED

Peter Lougheed died last week. Though many people remember him for many things, in recent years it has not been possible for me to hear his name without recalling the summer I helped to make him Premier. It was the summer of 1971 and I was 17 years old. Voters in our riding, Sedgewick-Coronation, had voted Social Credit for as long as they could remember, and they weren’t about to change their votes for some upstart lawyer from Calgary. Our local town was called Lougheed, named after Peter’s grandfather, and my folks thought it was time for a change. My dad looked around the village of Lougheed for a candidate to run for the Progressive Conservatives. Finding one, he and a few others put the wheels in motion. Mom was designated as full time volunteer at the election office. I was designated as cook and bottle washer. We were farmers. Summer was the time when there were men to cook for. Early that summer peter Lougheed announced that he would be kicking off his campaign in Lougheed. My family was over the moon. “Write a song,” commanded my parents. “We’ll have a parade.” So I wrote a song, to the tune of Has Anybody Seen My Gal. My song said, Herb Losness For The Lougheed Team. “Call up Gail,” commanded my parents. Gail was my best friend in high school. She was going to be a nurse. I was going to be a social worker. Her home town was Hardisty. Peter Lougheed’s grandmother was a Hardisty before she married a Lougheed. Gail and I were about as geeky as two teen-agers could be. Geeky was what they wanted. Both of us loved old-fashioned music. Our moms were handy with the sewing machines. Soon we were outfitted in Conservative colours, orange hot pants and blue tights. I got out the old accordion. Gail and I climbed onto parade floats singing Herb Losness For The Lougheed Team. For fillers, we sang a Johnny Cash song about the disintegration of a musical group with conflicting political leanings. Late August found us standing in a crowd of thousands on the parking lot of the Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium. Other constituencies had sent singers for their own songs. I pumped up the accordion and we shouted ours over the din. Then we all went inside, far too many of us for the fire regulations, to cheer wildly at anything and everything Peter Lougheed said. It was election fever at the pitch. Election day arrived. The people of Sedgewick-Coronation voted Social Credit. The rest of Alberta voted for Peter and the Conservatives have reigned ever since. Later that year, I turned 18 and earned the right to vote. So far, that is my only experience working actively on a political campaign. For Gail and me—both of us volunteer church pianists in later life, it’s a memory that never fails to bring a good laugh. And though you might wonder about the ethics of enlisting help from campaigners too young to vote, I don’t think I felt abused. Just amused, and involved.

WHERE IS THE HOPE TALK?

I am hoping Obama will start talking about hope again when the American Democratic convention gets going this week. I am waiting for it, listening with a pricked ear for the mention of it in the mainstream media. To tell the truth, I’ve really missed hearing about hope lately. We’ve been hearing less about hope than we did four years ago. I am not party to any information that would explain the change. Did the advisers suggest that talking about hope would not be helpful? Is it because people sneered at the explicit mention of hope? Is Obama less hopeful than he was, given a four-year dose of reality? I listened for explicit talk of hope in last week’s coverage of the American Republican Convention. Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t hear the word. I thought this peculiar, given how effective the hope talk proved in getting their opponent elected last time. I thought maybe they’d pick it up somehow. To be fair, if hope wasn’t explicitly mentioned, there was an implicit reference that might be perceived as hopeful. There was a lot of talk about “Getting America back on track”. The tug of nostalgia was employed as a forward force. Back, it seems to me, is the operative word here. It suggests that America was once on track, and then it wasn’t. It suggests that the future will be good once you go back to where you were. The fundamental difficulty with this, from the shared perspectives of both hope and reality, is that the track you want to go back to is the track that got you to where you are now—a place you don’t want to be. Who, having thought carefully about it, would really want to take that journey again? The thing I most like about explicit hope talk is that it seems to open up the question of how things can be different, and then requires an evaluation of just how you want things to be. But you can’t stop there. You have to look back to find evidence that things can change. The evidence gives you the motivation to do what you have to do. When hope talk shaped the rhetoric of Obama, he crafted stories that would give voters hope. The mention of hope compelled him to address two populations, the population who was served by the old track, and the population who was excluded. He managed to appeal to both, and they voted for him. Talking about hope is hard work. The easy part is thinking of things to hope for. The hard part is finding the reasons that legitimize the sense of hope. But the whole thing is worth the effort because when people hope, they are more apt to act. Even the most inspired president cannot run a country alone. Like the guide on a white water raft, a president can best steer the raft through the rapids when the people take up the direction and paddle together towards it. As a hope scholar, I like to be able to watch what happens when people make an effort to employ hope in any endeavour. Given how the campaign went four years ago, I had expected to hear more about it this time. I hope I will not be disappointed.

WHERE FOOD COMES FROM

One spring day I stood before a roomful of 20-somethings and shared, with what I hoped was eloquence, a thought that inspired me. “To have hope,” I said, “is to see the evidence that one thing can be more than one thing, depending on how you treat it. Think,” I waxed, “of the simple egg. One day it’s an egg. You take it into the house, you add a little heat, and it’s a boiled egg. You can eat it for breakfast. Or,” I gushed, “you can leave the egg in the nest, let a bird provide a little warmth, and in only three weeks that egg will be a new baby bird.” I stood silent, a pregnant pause. This was the moment when the audience would flower under the dome of inspiration. This was the moment when they would see how every object that appears to be something can also be something else. But this was the moment when they refused to be inspired. “Ugh,” they said. “That is gross! Eggs you buy at the store have been specially treated. They would never be baby birds.” This, it turned out, was the moment when I inadvertently took the joy away from the eating of eggs. There was nothing left to do but change the subject and get on with the workshop which, until that moment of confusion, was focused on the topic of hope. I tell this story today because it helps to explain the thing I will be doing tomorrow—spending three hours on a bus tour of market gardens—learning where our local food comes from. It’s not that I don’t know where food comes from. I am a farm girl. I have dined on the finest 4H calves that, only a few weeks earlier, were led in the show rings by my school friends. I have helped prepare Sunday dinners by holding fat roosters so Mom could chop off their heads with an axe. I have scrubbed bushels of cucumbers for dill pickles, shelled pots of peas collected from the garden in milk pails, dropped seed potatoes into planting holes and retrieved from the plants the bounty they created. But I am also a city girl, and it’s several decades since I plucked a chicken or planted a potato. My city is growing, now placing buildings on some of our finest land which, many years ago was annexed to accommodate future growth. Tomorrow many of us will be taking an educational tour, supporting market gardeners in the view that a city is not only a place to eat food, but also a place to grow food. The people in my spring workshop who were not inspired by my egg eloquence may, or may not be on the tour. But I had gone wrong when I assumed that they understood and embraced the basic concepts of food production. This, it turns out, was not a valid assumption. Clearly we city dwellers, we who cast the deciding votes that determine how our cities will be structured, need also to be connected to the sources of the food we eat. Tomorrow I’ll learn something.

GORE VIDAL

Gore Vidal Dies at 86; Prolific, Elegant, Acerbic Writer --New York Times, 01/08/2012 Gore Vidal was an unexpected teacher of mine. From the New York Times: “He published some 25 novels, two memoirs and several volumes of stylish, magisterial essays. He also wrote plays, television dramas and screenplays. For a while he was even a contract writer at MGM. And he could always be counted on for a spur-of-the-moment aphorism, put-down or sharply worded critique of American foreign policy. Mr. Vidal took great pleasure in being a public figure. He twice ran for office — in 1960, when he was the Democratic Congressional candidate for the 29th District in upstate New York, and in 1982, when he campaigned in California for a seat in the Senate — and though he lost both times, he often conducted himself as a sort of unelected shadow president. He once said, “There is not one human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”” That last quote made me chuckle. I remember a time when I also believed that the world would be a better place if people would only listen to me. I think I was fifteen years old. I got over the feeling, but I still remember it. I would not likely have noticed Vidal’s death if he had not died at the time when I had just begun to read one of his books, and I would not have continued to read that book if I hadn’t heard of his death at the moment when I was deciding to return it to the CNIB Library—having read only the first couple of chapters. At the moment before I heard the news I would have told you that I had begun a rather dull book called 1876 by an author I’d never heard of. The moment after I heard about his death, I decided to find out a little more about Gore Vidal. Though I am certain that I would not have liked this pompous and opinionated man, the Times reported other things that endeared Vidal to me. He was an activist who tried to change things. Vidal was gay, and he courageously wrote about that at a time when it was unacceptable to write about it. He created a wider awareness by addressing “sexual deviation” in novels. He as a forerunner of societal shift in attitude and his career paid a price for this prescience. This alone would have impressed me, but might not have kept me reading, for the recording of 1876 was difficult to follow. It was dubbed onto CD from a worn studio recording made for cassette tape. The combination of Vidal’s descriptive prose with the muffled reading was an apt substitute for sleeping pills when I listened from a horizontal position. The decision to stay the course was clinched by another revelation: “He loved to read to his grandfather, who was blind, and sometimes accompanied him onto the Senate floor.” And so it was that I resolved to stay awake through every muffled chapter of 1876. I am glad that I persevered, for Vidal’s extensive research, coupled with his ability to create story, introduced me to a time that can teach us something today. 1876 was a year when Americans lost sight of the importance of their democracy. Fearful of restarting the civil war that had so recently ended, they allowed an un-elected president to push aside the man his country had chosen for the job. They attributed his election to the voting power of the Negroes, who had recently been given the vote. To reverse this unexpected change, they permitted several southern states to produce two sets of election results, one on election night, and a later set of results with different counts. By this means the election was decided. People stepped back when they ought to have stepped forward. I have learned many interesting things from unexpected teachers. Gore Vidal is one of them.

THE FUTURE IS NOT THE PAST

Statistics predict the future based on the past. They are important in telling us how things were. And here is something to remember when you get to thinking that things never change for women. For more than 100 years there was virtually no chance that the Premier of Alberta would be a female. And then, in 2012, there was only one question: In the race of five leaders, which of the two female contenders would get the position?

HOPE, WOMEN, POLITICS, MEDIA

I am delighted that we have female party leaders running in our election.
I hope women will be as comfortable in politics as men are.
I hope to help them be comfortable by promoting a Name It, Change It a website that identifies how sexism in the media gives male candidates the upper edge when it comes to getting elected, and provides a media guide to help media write fairly about female and male candidates.
I hope our media will use that media guide.
I hope we will support the media writers who use the guide, and withdraw attention and support from those media outlets who choose to get attention by disadvantaging females in politics through sexist coverage.

OASIS OF HOPE IN JERUSALEM

There is a place in Jerusalem where anyone can get free eye care regardless of religion. That place is St. John Eye Hospital
Built in Jordan in 1960 to serve a population too poor to get medical services, the hospital suddenly found itself in Israel when the ground on which it stands changed hands in the war of 1967. The staff at St. John are Jewish, Christian, Muslim. One thing they can all agree on—giving people back their eyesight is a good thing. And so the doctors and nurses cross borders every day, and the patients cross borders every day, and the borders are heavily guarded, and sometimes they don’t get to the hospital in time for surgery. But they keep on working, year in and year out so that people of all faiths will not be unnecessarily blind.

WHAT A MOTHER CAN DO

In the mix of hope and politically motivated change, there is an order of things. First we believe that something is possible, and then we engage enough people for a long enough time in the hard work of making it so.
So far the current storm of rhetoric about future seniors benefits is failing utterly to engage my hope. Personally, I hope there will be seniors benefits for my children. My children represent a broad and very picture of society. Some of them will live their adult lives as well-paid professionals. Others will earn minimum wage doing work that is important to all of us.
With our leaders scrambling for attention, it seems that I am being asked to choose between two visions. In the one vision, there are no sacrifices to be made. Then, in thirty years or so, everything will be all right. In the other, catastrophe will befall us at any moment. Neither vision engages me as a possibility worth working on. And yet, as a hopeful person, I am still waiting.
What is it that would engage my hope? I am waiting to hear what we are aiming for, an end I could believe in. And then, with that hoe planted firmly in view, I would like to hear some ideas about sacrifices we boomers need to make now so that all my children can have security as seniors. When the debate takes that direction, I think I may begin to hope, and when I hope, I seem to be more ready to work on the hard stuff.

WHERE IS OBAMA ON HOPE?

Obama is talking less about hope these days, mentioning the word hardly at all, being, in general, less explicit about it than he was in the previous campaign. Has hope become unimportant to him then, or is it simply the natural progression of events in the career of a man who took on the mantle of power with great passion and discovered that, without the ongoing sacrificing support of many others, he cannot fix everything? If I were in charge of the world, I’d call him up and ask him, but since I am busy, and he is so hard to reach, I’ll bet on the natural progression theory.
I remember how he thrilled me back in 2008 with his ever-present use of the word in all its forms, his passionate support for hope, his gathering of hope around stories for the past, his urging of a country—no, the world—to move toward it. I remember how it warmed me to see how a message of hope brought the citizens of a country together to vote in a manner they likely had not intended at the start of the campaign. Here was evidence of hope in action, the realization of a hope lady’s dream.
Obama is still doing hope work today, albeit in a more subtle way, working, as we say in hope studies, implicitly rather than explicitly with hope. He’s finding hopeful stories from the past. He’s praising good work in the present. He’s using the word imagination and setting up the picture of a possible future.
Yes, I say it’s a natural progression, much like the one we see in so many instances. Explicit talk of hope gets you started, and then you get down to the hard stuff. Those who have a natural tendency to be hopeful handle the hard stuff more gently, more positively than those who prefer to embrace the future by bashing their opponents to smitherines in a good scrap.
That said, THE HOPE LADY is watching, hoping, for signs that Obama has not forgotten how important it is to mention hope every once in a while.

DAVID JOHNSTON'S MESSAGE OF HOPE

Here, from our Governor General is a message for the future.
Governor General David Johnston

OTTAWA— In the little over a year since I was installed as Governor General, Sharon and I have had the opportunity to travel to almost every corner of our
country—and to meet with Canadians from nearly every walk of life. It has been a remarkable experience.

What has struck us most is the generosity of Canadians. Generous with their talents, their time and their treasure. More than 80% of Canadians make some
kind of financial donation to a worthy cause every year. And some 12 million Canadians spend over two billion hours volunteering.

Those are impressive numbers and speak to the kind of people we are—and the kind of country we’ve built. We are a nation of barn raisers.

Whether it’s because of the geography we share or the climate we endure, giving seems to crop up everywhere in our society. We are bound to one another.
And every day, in countless ways large and small, Canadians demonstrate their gift for giving.

I have been reflecting upon the generosity of Canadians while thinking about the year ahead. In every new year lies the promise of a new beginning.

An opportunity to improve our lives and enrich our country. And as Canada approaches its 150th anniversary, in 2017, it’s time to renew our efforts to imagine
the kind of country we want—and to start building it in the New Year.

Imagine a smarter, more caring Canada. A Canada where giving—in all its forms—time, talent, altruism become an even more integral part of our daily lives—a
main stream part of being Canadian.

During the holiday season, each of us can plainly see the effect that the spirit of generosity and goodwill has upon our lives and our communities. And
each year we ask ourselves, ‘Why can’t every day be so full of sharing?’

Indeed, ‘Why not?’ An everyday culture of giving is one of the defining features of successful societies everywhere. This has been the case throughout Canada’s
past, but we cannot take it for granted. Together, let us renew our gift for giving as we look to the future.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH CANADA CAN BE FIXED

An Article To Make You Hope To Vote
But you’ll have to ignore the headline if you want to get the hope out of it. Headline writers often hold the theory that we’d prefer to read discouraging articles. Thanks to Ruth Haley in Guelph for sending it along with a new title that would attract my hope focused attention.

COALITION IS MY HOPE WORD OF THE DAY

My hope word of the day is coalition. What, I ask, could ultimately be more hopeful, more progressive, more useful, than a group of people or factions coming together around a common purpose, whatever that purpose might be? Coalition speaks of cooperation, of negotiation. It smacks of combination, of listening and hearing what would interest other parties. Coalitions are forged in living rooms, around kitchen tables, in board rooms, during phone calls. Coalitions lead to changes of mind, modifications of behavior. Coalitions lead to problem-solving.
Of course, coalitions are not essential. Any time we don’t agree, is there not the popular alternative of annihilating the enemy, screaming louder at townhall events, meeting in secret to plan the assault, stocking arms depots? Like I said, coalition is my hope word of the day.

AN ELECTION IS HOPE

The taxi driver is hoping—hoping that the recent movements in the Arab world will free the people from their autocratic leaders. He came to Canada from Eritrea. Is his hope audacious? Well, maybe.
Our own prime minister has just called an election. And while the news reports the sadness of it all, an election called merely because parliamentarians couldn’t get along. Should we Canadians take up the media’s sad lament, OR MIGHT WE take to the streets and kiss the ground in gratitude that such a dispute leads to an election and not the dropping of a bomb, or 40 years of bloody tyranny?
AN ELECTION IS AN ACT OF HOPE, AN ACT OF PRIVILEGE. LET US LOOK AROUND THE WORLD, AND CHERISH THAT!!!!!

PLANNING, ACTING AND EXPLAINING

Dan Gardner on the relationship between planning, acting, leadership, and explaining it later:

“Asked to name the greatest challenge to their plans that leaders face, British prime minister Harold Macmillan famously responded, "Events, dear boy. Events."

Only in hindsight do we see leaders carefully formulating plans prior to taking power, then deliberately enacting them in their entirety. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the supreme example. Running for the presidency in 1932, FDR's campaign promises looked nothing like the New Deal he ultimately created. But FDR didn't have a hidden agenda. There wasn't much of an agenda, hidden or otherwise. There was only a small group of men, terrified by the scale of the crisis and the pace of events, desperately putting bits and pieces together into what they hoped would be a functioning machine. "To look upon these policies as the result of a unified plan," wrote Raymond Moley, Roosevelt's top aide, "was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter's tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy's bedroom could have been put there by an interior designer."”

It is a pity that we tend now to focus entirely on the promises leaders make rather than on the principles they represent. It’s their principles we ought to count on. If those principles prove inappropriate for a current reality, then that is what we ought to look back on, not on a count of broken promises.
Gardner is writing about politics, but his observations might apply equally well to the situations you face when you are counselling. You come in—and this is the first thing that differentiates one counsellor from another—with a set of guiding principles and maybe even some ideas about the first few things you will say. Then, some time in the first ten minutes, you hear a story and, as often as not, you are somewhere you didn’t intend to be. In the space of an hour—and this is the second thing that differentiates one counsellor from another—you make certain decisions about how to fit your principles to the events unfolding before you.

The central idea that took hold of me from the moment when I originally climbed the steps to the front door of Hope House was, “There ought to be hope here. People expect it of a place called Hope House.” I long ago lost count of our partially fulfilled promises—uttered in earnest--to make categorical and chronological sense of the array of strategies, practices, tools, processes and experiments we’ve tried to frame as a coherent picture. At times the frustration and complexity of the prospect has driven me nearly to despair.
These days I am more inclined to settle for a principle rather than a promise to pull it all together. If there is any over-arching factor that can account for the work done by the team at the Hope Foundation of Alberta perhaps it is this: Regardless of what is happening, how often it has already happened and the outlook for the future, there ought to be hope. Somebody needs to see it. It might be both of us, or me first, or you first. All the tools we have are aimed towards making sure somebody does.
Fortunately for us, we have been able to stick with the principle. Most of what we have learned focusses on what it takes to adapt that principle to the current reality. If only our political leaders could be viewed and evaluated in that light, if only we’d encourage them to constantly reiterate the principle in order to explain the action of choice, we’d all be better off.

CONGRATULATIONS LIU XIAOBO

Congratulations to you, Liu Xiaobo, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. You won it for suggesting that people should have the right to choose their leaders. A simple concept, really. One that is easily taken for granted by those who have the right to choose. As I understand it, your leaders are saying that there is no need for you to choose. You ought to trust them more.
Here in Edmonton we are in the midst of a civic election campaign. It is almost impossible for us to understand what it would mean to live in a country where you could be thrown in jail for 11 years for supporting the idea of making choices on a ballot. Here in Edmonton, they beg us to vote. We tire of hearing political rhetoric. We grumble that there’s nobody we want to vote for. Sometimes we don’t even vote. Can you imagine that?
Yesterday I voted in our upcoming civic election. I cast my vote in the advance poll (note to all candidates who plan to interrupt my dinner by having your machines call me before the election, it’s too late.) I voted privately and independently. As I pushed the final button to roll my ballot out of the voting machine, I thought of you, Liu Xiaobo. I wondered what you’d say if you knew how far we in Edmonton have gone to ensure a private and independent vote.
My private and independent vote was assured by a machine that read me the ballot and allowed me to choose candidates by pressing buttons. Before the ballot was confirmed, it gave me a chance to hear my votes again, a chance to be sure I’d done what I wanted to do. We’ve had this marvellous opportunity for several municipal elections. It may not seem like such a big thing to others. In fact, the country and the province have not figured out how to make it happen in their elections. If you are a blind chooser of leaders for the country or the province, somebody has to swear an oath of reliability and help you cast your vote. But when I vote for civic government in Edmonton, I cast my own vote for mayor, councillor and school trustee.
Many years ago an election official asked me if it really mattered that much. “Isn’t it just as good to have somebody you trust mark your ballot according to your instructions?”
I wondered for a moment how to answer. Providing this machine costs money. Is it money well spent? I took a deep breath and I said it mattered to me, even though I did trust the person who would mark my ballot.
I wonder how you’d answer this question, Liu Xiaobo. Would my little quest for independence seem inconsequential to you in view of the larger needs of a wider world? I’d like to ask you, if only they’d let you out of jail.
I do hope they will soon let you out of prison so that you can collect your prize. I also hope they will some day let you cast the vote of your choice in your own country. I suppose there is a cost for democracy everywhere. The cost is higher in some places.

THE HOPE LADY ADVISES PRESIDENT OBAMA

The first voice I heard when I woke up this morning belonged to one of my most famous hope heroes, Barack Obama. It was not the hopeful voice I am accustomed to hearing, not the voice that made him my hope hero. Quite the contrary, in fact. It was a sad voice. He was trying to rally the Democrats and it did not appear to be going well. You could hear the fatigue in his tone. He was chiding them, scolding them, urging them to get back to work. Senate elections are coming up and it sounded like he was feeling an urgent need for supportive followers. It’s a nasty position for a guy who needs the help of millions if he’s to convert his hopes into accomplishments.
Helplessly watching your very own hope hero suffer is a painful thing and I was feeling the pain. Even though I hadn’t brushed my hair or my teeth, even though it was 6:00 AM, not my optimal hour of best compassion, my heart went out to him. The reporter playing the clip was presenting evidence to prove that Obama is a desperate man. The speech excerpts he had chosen did appear to support that. So at that early moment, applying the twisted logic you might expect at 6:01 AM from a sleepy HOPE LADY I made a declaration. I promised to do whatever I could do to help my hope hero go forward in his hour of need. Only one question remained to be answered? Exactly what is it that a Canadian HOPE LADY can do for a President of the United States?
By the time the sun rose I was seriously considering some options. I could give money. Giving $10.00 would be relatively easy, except for the problem of exchanging the money into American currency, and the possible legal impediments that might prevent US politicians from accepting donations from Canadians. But on second thought, what use would Barack have for the equivalent of ten Canadian dollars? There might be a better option.
I considered calling an American talk show and stating my opinion on a variety of political issues. It seems like a lot of people get most of their information from talk shows these days, and most of my opinions are in line with barack’s stated hopes. This seemed plausible, until I realized that I’d have to start listening to American talk shows in order to find the one that would most likely take my call. That use of my time tempted me about as much as the idea of eating political pamphlets for a mid-morning snack. I decided to keep thinking.
Lunchtime arrived and still I had no plan of action. Assisting a US president is not as easy as you might think. But with the help of a little confidence boost and some thinking-it-through assistance from Rachel, a plan of action was at last devised. I would steer away from the thing that has so far earned me no respect—the formidable task of influencing American politics and steer toward something more familiar. I would offer my best HOPE LADY advice to Barack Obama. And here it is.
Stick with the hope stuff Barack! It served you well before, and there is no reason to believe it can’t do that again.
State your hopes for your country in the language of I hope. You’ve done it before. You can do it again. Stating hopes is a momentum builder. You could use some momentum now.
Refuse to choose between hope and reality. You don’t have to worry about losing reality. It will be there. Focus on the thing you might lose—hope.
Hang out with hopeful people—the people who give you hope. Hope is contagious. Some people are extraordinarily good at spreading it. You have shown yourself to be good at giving it, and it’s best to keep your own supply up.
Keep up your supply of hope by looking for hope in your past experience. Pay particular attention to things that turned out better than you expected, things that were possible when you thought they weren’t. Write about these things. Talk about these things. It’s easy to lose sight of them when you get really busy trying to fix absolutely everything.
And finally, try not to give too much attention to the hope-suckers, those people and events that suck out all the hope leaving you with only fear and despair. The media is already giving them more credence than they’ve earned. They’ll tell you that hope is not enough to fix everything. Who do they think they’re talking to? This is not news. Having hope is an efficiency measure. It’s just a whole lot easier to do anything worth doing when you have hope. Insist that others should offer a hope to match every hope of yours. Don’t let them off the hook until they do.
If this is not enough to make things better, I still have ten available Canadian dollars to give you. Proof positive that there is always one more option.

ANNIVERSARY

Trudy’s note says:
Wendy I am looking forward to your piece on Barack's first anniversary. I was just reading something like that in the paper, by Lisa Van Dusen of the Washington
Bureau, and thought of you. At least he's still on his feet right?

What an interesting time it’s been! To have a prominent public figure use hope strategies in public, to have him teach a lesson on everything we know about the power of hope to nfluence behavior, the role of hope language in creating hope, and the emotional wallop you can get from a story if a hopeful person is organizing the content! Having come out so vehemently in support of Obama’s hope methods I, like Trudy, wondered how things would go for me if things didn’t go well for him.

This is what I want to write on the first anniversary of Obama’s election. I am disappointed for Barack, but not in him. I am disappointed for him because he took a big risk. He put his dreams out there in the most hopeful way possible and so far things have been pretty nasty. He says he has learned that governing is a lot harder than getting elected. Putting your dreams out there makes you very vulnerable. Cynical people who say they agree with your dreams, and those who blatantly disapprove of your dreams are bound to line up like spectators at a sporting event, watching in anticipation of your defeat. I guess that’s why so many of us are afraid to expose our dreams at the early stages when there is no certainty that they can come true. There was no certainty in Obama’s case because he did not have the power to make any of them come true without a lot of help from others. Anybody who thought that hope alone was going to make so many difficult things happen was seriously dillusional.
I am not disappointed in him because he never promised to give Americans health care, or end the war in Iraq. How could he promise these things without the power to enact them? What he did was to open up the possibility that they could happen, to say “Yes we can” when others said “No we can’t”. I am not disappointed in him because he proved that people could do something they never thought they could do in 2008--elect the first African American president. They could do that and they did do that, even though many of them thought it was impossible.
What else the American people will do in support of his dreams we do not, at this point, know. I am hoping they will rally behind the things he is trying to do so that they can get done. Their rallying will provide the power and the hope to continue. Then maybe he can get on with other things they want him to do.
At this point Barack is still my hero. I am continuing to read his speeches at workshops, to use them as examples of how we can use hope language to influence the behavior of others. As things developed I have been expecting to receive criticism for this, but so far I have received only support.

CONGRATULATIONS OBAMA!!!!!!!

An the news flash says:

Barack Obama awarded Nobel Peace Prize for bringing hope. Critics say he hasn’t taken any action.

I say it will take a lot of action by a lot of people to make the change he brought hope for, and we have yet to see whether enough people will take enough action to make it come about. But we could say for sure that none of this change would likely be possible unless someone with the power to lead led many other people to hope for it too.

HOPE, HEALTH CARE AND MY LETTER FROM BARACK OBAMA

I sent an email to Barack Obama. Even before I had pressed Send I had begun to doubt myself. What self-respecting Canadian, after all, would send fanmail to a U.S. president? Why I truly am a proud Canadian, and never once have I send fanmail to a Canadian prime minister. In fact, I’ve rarely written to a Canadian prime minister. I think only once, during a moment of utter outrage when Elizabeth May was about to be denied a position in the televised leaders’ debate.
It seemed a little silly to waste an email on barack Obama. Certainly he would not take the time to read my note. Most likely I’d only be costing him money, wages paid to the person who reads the email. Still, it seemed like I ought to support a hope-focussed leader living right next door. I thought he ought to know that there are centres for hope studies. I thought he ought to know that there’s a hope scholar in Canada who teaches university classes using text from his speeches. I thought that maybe a really bad day would come, a day so filled with despair that he would be reduced to reading fanmail just to keep himself going. The more I thought about all this, the more sense it made to dash off a little note. So I did.
Barack Obama didn’t reply to my note—at least not right away. I kind of appreciated this because I knew that any reply I would get wood be a form letter. Even the most dedicated heroes are reduced to answering fanmail with form letters. So I really did not mind receiving no reply.
But then I did receive a letter in the email—not in the first month, not in the second month. It came in the third month. The subject line read: Health Care News worth Sharing. The signature said Barack Obama. My first thought was: “”Oh no. I’ve got my name on some general email list. Right now I’d better unsubscribe.””
I thought of the email as junk mail, but I didn’t unsubscribe in the first week. It seemed too soon. I didn’t unsubscribe in the second week either. In the third week I moved the email to Deleted Items. But I still didn’t unsubscribe. The letter was safe for a while. I only delete Deleted Items about once a year.
Then yesterday I heard a radio interview with a Canadian who has been recruited by American companies to make public pronouncements over American media describing our Canadian health care system as ineffective and excessively costly. . That got my attention. I opened up the deleted Items folder and had a second look. The message from Barack says

“”The Vice President and I just met with leaders from the House of Representatives and received their commitment to pass a comprehensive health care reform
bill by July 31.

We also have an unprecedented commitment from health care industry leaders, many of whom opposed health reform in the past. Monday, I met with some of
these health care stakeholders, and they pledged to do their part to reduce the health care spending growth rate, saving more than two trillion dollars
over the next ten years -- around $2,500 for each American family. Then on Tuesday, leaders from some of America's top companies came to the White House
to showcase innovative ways to reduce health care costs by improving the health of their workers.

Now the House and Senate are beginning a critical debate that will determine the health of our nation's economy and its families. This process should be
transparent and inclusive and its product must drive down costs, assure quality and affordable health care for everyone, and guarantee all of us a choice
of doctors and plans.

Reforming health care should also involve you. Think of other people who may want to stay up to date on health care reform and other national issues and
tell them to join us.

Health care reform can't come soon enough. We spend more on health care than any country, but families continue to struggle with skyrocketing premiums
and nearly 46 million are without insurance entirely. It is a priority for the American people and a pillar of the new foundation we are seeking to build
for our economy.””

I thought about the Canadians who are being paid to tear the system down before it even gets off the ground. I wondered about their expectation for the future, how much they’d like to be one of the 46 million Americans who have no health insurance.

Lately I’ve been going to the doctor. Nobody asks me how much money I have. My insurance is guaranteed. Sure I grumble. I’d like to be treated more kindly, seen more quickly by specialists. Of course I’d like to keep taxes as low as possible. But it occurred to me that maybe Stephen Harper, our very own prime minister, maybe Stephen Harper doesn’t know I want to pay taxes to support health care. Maybe Premier Ed Stelmach doesn’t know it either.

It has never occurred to me to send fanmail to our premier or prime minister. Unlike Barack, they rarely make public statements that fill me with hope and delight. But I just might send them a little fanmail about our health system, and I don’t think I’ll unsubscribe to Barack’s email list any time soon. One little email isn’t exactly overkill after all, and my fanmail must have been read, given that they knew this topic would be of interest to me.
I believe universal health care is a very hopeful thing. I believe that supporting it is an act of hope. I think I’d better boost the hope of our leaders by saying how much I like it, to be a small voice speaking in the din of all the complaining that comes so much more easily to the tip of the tongue and the button marked Send. Hope grows when people work together for something they value. False despair is out health system’s greatest threat.