Hope

What is hope? According to Dictionary.com hope is "To wish for something with expectation of its fulfillment."

But why should we be hopeful, even when we get let down, when things don't turn out right?

If you don't hope and believe that things can change, or get better, then they will not. Good stuff rarely happens to people who believe it can't happen to them. If I believe America will continue down the path of governing by political parties that don't serve the people, then I will act in a way that will not promote the change, thus making it more unlikely. By hoping that change can actually occur, it will become more likely.

Likewise with personal goals, if I don't believe I can do well in math, sure enough, I won't. But if I hope that I can do better, and act in a way to achieve those ends, it is very likely.

Hope things can get better, and hold on to your dreams, if they will truly make you happy.

The Giant's Drink

In the book Ender's Game, there is a computer game the main character, Ender, plays, where the player is met with various scenarios. At one point Ender meets a giant.

"How about a guessing game?" asked the Giant. So it didn't any difference - the Giant only played the guessing game. Stupid computer. Millions of possible scenarios in its memory, and the Giant could only play one stupid game.

The Giant, as always, set two huge shot glasses, as tall as Ender's knees, on the table in front of him. As always, the two were filled with different liquids. The computer was good enough that the liquids had never repeated, not that he could remember. This time one had a thick, creamy looking liquid. The other hissed and foamed.

"One is poison and one is not," said the Giant. "Guess right and I'll take you into Fairyland."

[...]

He drank the creamy liquid. Immediately he began to inflate and rise like a balloon. The Giant laughed. He was dead agin.

[...]

He stared at the two liquids. The one foaming, the other with waves in it like the sea. He tried to guess what kind of death each one held. Probably a fish will come out of the ocean one and eat me. The foamy one will probably asphyxiate me. I hate this game. It isn't fair. It's stupid. It's rotten.

And instead of pushing his face into one of the liquids, he kicked one over, then the other, and dodged the Giant's huge hands as the Giant shouted, "Cheater, cheater!" He jumped at the Giant's face, clambered up his lip and nose, and began to dig in the Giant's eye. The stuff came away like cottage cheese, and as the Giant screamed, Ender's figure burrowed into the eye, climbed right in, burrowed in and in.

The Giant fell over backward. The view shifted as he fell, and when the Giant came to a rest on the ground, there were intricate, lacy trees all around. A bat flew up and landed on the dead Giant's nose. Ender brought his figure up out of the Giant's eye.

"How did you get here?" the bat asked. "Nobody ever comes here."

This excerpt is a great example of how people only look at the obvious routes, even though the one that isn't seen is the one that will lead to success. If you liked the excerpt, then read the book. The author, Orson Scott Card, makes a lot of really good points about how people live their lives.

Being Real

How can we know what we believe? When you ask someone the question "What do you believe?", you can get all kinds of answers. But they may not be telling the truth. Furthermore, they may not even realize they are lying. I believe that the way a person acts is far more telling about what they believe than what they say. You can claim to believe certain things all day long, but without actions to back it up, all the words you say are meaningless.

So what should be done about this? My short answer is live in a way that the beliefs that you speak match the beliefs that you live. Getting to this point is not easy, but then you won't be a hypocrite, or a liar.

In summary, saying that you believe one thing and living inconsistantly with that is pointless, and helps no one.

A Quickie

When I ask people about changing the world, they say they want the world to change, but they act in a way that will make it harder to change the world. I think this is best exemplified in a couple quotes:

"You should be the change that you want to see in the world." -Mohandas Gandhi

"The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it." -Ayn Rand

Election 2004

To start off, I would like to post the lyrics to a song that, in my opinion, is an accurate description US politics:

Four more years of War is Peace, Ignorance is Stenght and Slavery is Freedom.
Four more. May all your interventions be "Humanitarian".
Four more years of pay-to-play politics, power and influence.
Four more years of legalized bribery and served corporate interests.

Vote for tweedle-dum or tweedle-dee
And a framework of debate narrowed for you courtesy
Of the ultra-rich and a media that filters
But any voice that challenges their power
(like Nader bounced in Boston by state-troppers
Cos he don't speak for oil-xycoons and bankers, oh yeah
Whose pursuit of happiness and liberty
Demands a rhetoric of fear to be
The litmus test for viable heirs to
The phony drug-wars, the trumped-up rogue-states, the permance of a war-economy).

I feel less hopeful and less human
As I'm reduced to nothing more than
Cheering on embassy bombings
As the liars pave their way through

Four more years of War is Peace, Ignorance is Stenght and Slavery is Freedom.
Four more. May all your interventions be "Humanitarian".
Four more years of pay-to-play politics, power and influence.
Four more years of legalized bribery and served corporate interests.

Propaghandi - War Is Peace

For popular vote results that include every presidential candidate, go to The Washington Post

Now for my prediction about politics from here on out.

I think there is a chance there will be a lawsuit filed by the losing candidate. But more importantly, the media will completely ignore third party candidate even more than in the past. The will spin elections into the "lesser of two evils" so that people feel they cannot "waste their vote" by voting for a third party. Essentially, I think the media will help entrench the two-party system, because I think they are in bed with both parties.

If you want to help stop this, vote for third party candidate, especially for local elections, or run as a third party candidate. If change is going to happen, it will happen initially at the local level.

Either way, I don't think the country will be better off, no matter who is declared the winner.