The Installation of Hope

 When my beloved Susan was alive and still working with the clients in her psychotherapy practice, she used to talk about her job as being about ‘the installation of hope’. I was always taken with the wisdom of that expression. It was what she did. Her clients were largely people afflicted with varying degrees of traumatic brain injury, whose lives had been disrupted and, in some cases, nearly destroyed. She helped them give voice to their frustrations, she helped them cope, and most importantly, helped them to believe that their lives could improve. It was miraculous to bear witness to this process.

As human beings we are wired to hope. If we were not, given the vicissitudes of life, most of us would probably jump off a cliff at the first opportunity, and yet we do not. We persist. We hope. We hope our lives will improve. We hope that our children's’ lives will be better than ours.

I would submit that one of the main responsibilities of our leadership in this country, or indeed in any country in the world is the installation of hope, especially in times of crisis. Very few of our leaders over the nearly 250 years of our existence as a nation have been able to do that. In 1932-1933, our country was facing arguably the worst financial crisis of its history. Banks were failing, farms and homes were being foreclosed by the thousands, and a substantial portion of the work force found itself unemployed.

Along came a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, born to wealth and privilege, and for much of his life up to that point, regarded as a lightweight. But by 1932, when he first ran for president, he had suffered an unspeakable setback: polio, which crippled him. By the time he ran for president, he’d developed, through his suffering, an understanding of the human condition and a strong sense of empathy. In his first inaugural address he said, “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He then set about trying to solve the country’s problems. And while many of his administration’s efforts only marginally improved the situation at the time, the American people could see that he was taking action, and that gave them hope. And I would argue that the very hope they had helped to improve morale and thus improve the situation as a whole.

Now our country faces the same sort of crushing and awful crisis. Lives disrupted, lives lost in the hundreds of thousands, livelihoods lost, this crisis has devastated not only our country, but the world. And along came a man who knew what it meant to hurt. He knew what it meant to suffer. He had a strong sense of empathy. Joseph Biden knew that defeating the pandemic was the key to our recovery. Aeschylus, the ancient Greek playwright once said, “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God”.

While our current president may not be the most spellbinding speaker, he is installing hope that we will prevail. As broken as our politics is at the current time, we have been given reason to believe that we will defeat the virus, and then be able to work on the many and various problems that have eluded our attention.

Indeed, the installation of hope is one of the most important tools that a leader can bring to bear in a crisis situation. Let us continue to fill our leadership roles with people capable of empathy and thus, the installation of hope.

MPC 03-16-2021