A lot in my mind
The other night I had a dream. And in that dream, a friend of mine had taken his own life. It was not a good experience. But the worst part of that experience was that while I was going through it, I believed that it had actually happened. Despite the fact that this was only a dream and only in my head, I believed it. I believed it because I knew that it could actually happen. I believed that this good friend of mine was indeed capable of doing this awful thing and probably would if he was pushed that far. And that terrified me.
In that dream there was a message; "hope that it won't haplen again." It felt like an odd message in the wake of a crisis, but it also made sense. Because that's the exact message they'd push in the real world.
Every now and then you hear about another crisis. Another person taking their own life, another child getting an automatic weapon and shooting up a school. Each time we hear it's a tragedy, but each time, that's all we hear. No measures are ever taken to address the real issue or prevent it from happening. Instead we talk about it for a while and we go back to how it was before. And we hope that next time it won't be us. "Hope it won't happen again." But I'm the end of the day, hope just isn't enough. It's not going to stop another police officer with an itchy trigger finger. It's not gonna stop a child from taking a gun and taking it to school for show and tell. It's not gonna stop someone who's been pushed to the edge and decided to jump off. If we rely on hope, there will always be another Trayvon Martin, another Parkland. Another terrible thing. We can't stop it with hope alone. We can only stop it by taking action.
Once upon a man had a hope. He had a dream. And he used that dream to fight for what he believed in. And what be believed in gained rights for milloms of people. People who, up until then, had been told that they didn't matter. That man had hope. He took that hope and he new it into something more. And with it he changed the world for the better. And so can you. By taking your hope, And taking a stance.
On it's own, hope isn't good enough. But if we can take that hope, shape it, and turn it into something more; there's no telling what we can do.
