The last of Pandora's spirits: pure hope

[whirlygigspin]

"Recently, a friend told me her tale of Florida voting gone wrong — again. And though I felt the heavy weight of discouragement, I discovered something I had never expected to find in the darkness of these times. I found the last of Pandora's spirits — hope."

"...It wasn't patriotism, because patriotism is born of passion for a country and its practices that now exists. And my America had long disappeared with Reagan and Bush the Elder. No, what I felt was something that belonged to a distant memory, or perhaps to a dream, or even perhaps to the Massachusetts liberalism I was taught as a child through the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, of Henry David Thoreau, and of John F. Kennedy.

I actually found myself talking about the ideal of America as a shining city on a hill, as a beacon of promise for those genuinely in search of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And the New Yorker and the Floridian nodded their heads in agreement.

I imagined this same conversation happening among expatriate Americans everywhere as they too grappled with the discouraging, Karl Rovian politics — in Florida and around the world — of divide and conquer.

I even imagined that the harder Karl Rove and George W. Bush pushed their patrician politics down the throats of Americans the more they would provoke from dissidents and expatriates alike America's most powerful quality — its idealism.

And American idealism is pure hope — the last spirit of Pandora's box.

Steven Laffoley writes from Halifax.

http://www.rabble.ca/in_his_own_words.shtml?sh_itm=866f9c451366ca85150a3cd73d3838ae&r=1