Environmental destruction, billions of people starving or living hand-to-mouth, natural disasters, insane dictators, terrorism, corporate greed, urban violence, unprincipled politicians, and unreasoned governmental policies can make the world seem hopeless. But there are lilies among the debris and pond scum. You and I are those beautiful flowers waiting to blossom.
 
We can go about our business keeping our nose out of trouble only to have catastrophe befall us because the big players—business, institutions, and government—are not playing fair. The world at large is now the stage upon which we all are players. Like it or not we must think of the world-scale big picture. We are not independent islands. We must be interested and engaged. But how can one puny person be anything other than a pawn or victim of such large forces?
 
We are all empowered because we are made of the same organic stuff those who cause the problems are made of. If one person can mess things up on a world-scale (consider the impact of Attila, Napoleon, Hitler, Ossama), one person can make things better (consider Gandhi and Mother Theresa). Feeling hopeless and victimized can be self-fulfilling. Not only does pessimism and shrinking from difficulty cause torpor and permit evil to spread like a cancer, it also robs life of joy, fulfillment, and even health. Difficulty creates challenge, and challenge is the opportunity for us to be truly alive.
 
Hope resides in action, in feeling like we can make a difference, and that our deeds and words do matter. And they do. Our actions and thoughts can have impact worldwide. This can happen from direct contact networking—since everyone in the world is only about 5 or so networked people removed from everyone else—and from more ethereal mechanisms we are only beginning to understand such as holography, morphic resonance, and quantum reality. We are, in fact, part of one interconnected living whole. Losing hope based on just the events we personally see and hear is not justified. That's because we cannot know the truth of the reporting (bad news is a profit center for the media), but also because the reality we can know is only a tiny speck of the total reality.

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​Consider this as well. Have you ever met anyone you would consider fundamentally evil, bad, or ill intentioned? Yes, there are jerks, but once you get to know them they seem to be the decent sort as well. (Even mass murderers on death row get marriage proposals.) Have you not found that once you get to know almost anyone, no matter where they are or what they have done, that they seem to have the same basic goodness as you? That is the thread that holds the world together, the underlying and too often inchoate urge within us all to be good people and do what is right—something never heard on the evening news. It is that thread of goodness that is our hope and which should be nurtured.
 
Our best hope is to choose to live life as if we have brains—as if thinking matters. We should not fear departing from the unthinking masses and doing the acts and spreading the message of goodness. It is something every single one of us can do. It may, in fact, be the real reason we are here in the first place. The worst-case scenario is that we try to make a better world and the world does not get better or even explodes one day from a meteor or nuclear fusillade. So we tried. We did the best we could. We attempted to act intelligently, selflessly, lovingly, and responsibly. Are we not better for it? By living a life of such meaning have we not been alive, healthy, and purposed? Might it not accrue to our betterment if this is not all there is?
 
As bleak as things may seem at times, there is always hope. It resides in each of us reaching out with love, searching for truth, and trying to improve the world. We don't need hope; we are the hope.