The Past, the Present, and the Perhaps

I don’t know what lies beyond the here and now. Surely, neither do you. And since what we don’t know won’t kill us, the realm of the unknown up ahead is what gives us hope. We cling on to hope to calm ourselves from the panic, assuage our fear a little, abate our loneliness somehow, or generally promise ourselves that life won’t break us.

We have become so hopeless that we peg our hope on the uncertain.

Hope is a busy fellow. It is the promise of religions, upcoming elections, newly installed politicians, self-styled spiritual teachers a. k. a. gurus et. al. They thrive on the better ‘perhaps.’ And so, because the hopes that we pin on ‘perhaps’ will only mostly get us down and frustrate us, might it not be wiser to simply dwell on the ‘present’ and learn from the ‘past?’

Hope is precisely what is fooling us.

A centuries-old temple has become the stage of a very modern military standoff as Thailand and Cambodia quarrel over a piece of land on both the nations’ borders. It is both countries’ hopes that one will win over the other for the rightful ownership of the 800-year-old Khao Preah Vihear Temple. The holy dispute affects the Cambodian Buddhist monks the most as pressure has mounted, and both Cambodia and Thailand have escalated troop build-up near the historic border temple. We can only surmise as to what lies ahead for the Thai, the Cambodians, and the monks. Each party will otherwise want to have its own hopeful prediction.

George W. Bush transported more and more troops to Iraq, partly to help the Iraqis get united, but mostly to assure US taxpayers who have been funding the war that the White House has been right on target to hang on to the hope of victory. Now, all 5 surge brigades have left Iraq and the battle-riddled country is hopeful that the US will pull out all troops from combat by 2010. The air of uncertainty remains, however, over the fact that Iraqi troops still rely on American support and that Iraqi politicians may not really be capable to manage the country at this point.

The matter of Afghanistan is on both John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s foreign policy plate. Whoever wins the US elections means sending more troops to this yet another battle-riddled country, as US troop casualties are on the rise with the burgeoning Taliban mounting more attacks. Combat brigades of up to 15,000 troops will be sent to Afghanistan to tame the insurgency.

But terrorism and insurgency are only a part of Afghanistan’s pessimism. The country is grossly underdeveloped, having been ‘promised progress by every government since 1973,’ as a lowly Afghan worker laments. Afghanistan has been battling widespread drug addiction, corruption, lawlessness, and a massively handicapped economy. Where lies Afghanistan’s hope, then?

There really is just a ‘perhaps.’ It is the realm where solutions are found – or never found. The phrase ‘there’s hope in the future’ can be misleading. There’s only hope for the solution to certain aberrations of what can be deemed normal or ideal. There really is no hope for the tides to change.

That is why hope rests in the region of ‘perhaps.’ We are never equipped to find out the answer. Where problems and solutions are out of our reach, do we wring our hands and look up to heaven, or do we still nag ourselves with the question: are you part of the solution or part of the problem? The latter is the most stupid question that has floated around, really.

No need to ask that question. We are too small for that or too beyond it.

More and more, I’m seeing the logic why many of my countrymen go more often to lottery ticket outlets than to church. I can’t rob them of their newfangled definition of hope. Their religion and government have failed them.

If there is learned helplessness, there, too, is learned optimism. That is why I kiss a frog everyday.

Hope is like white light – immediately illuminating and blindly disorienting.