A lot of days I don’t have much hope, but there is one hope I do hang on to…..

                  IT’S A COLD January morning and I am thinking about hope. In the background an old Simon and Garfunkel album plays and that is what is what has gotten me thinking about hope.

            Events of the past year have tempered my hopes and changed my dreams. My wife of 57 years sits in a memory care unit seven blocks away, a place where hope has vanished the sorrows of reality walk the carpets. My knee hurts from a replacement weeks ago. The reality of age has crowded in on my 16-year-old mind and is telling it its time is past.

            The news brings sorrow and fear and makes a mockery of hope and portends pain and suffering for people and a nation.

            Still, the music, and memories of other music, gives me hope. It is not a hope that I will be a part of some massive change, that I will even live to see a return of the hands of sanity and compassion on the levers of power. That, of course, assumes such hands were there in the first place and that I have not looking back on the past through the lens of delusion.

            Here is what the music takes me to. It takes me back to when the music for me was Simon and Garfunkel, Odetta, Joan Baez, Peter Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger and so many more. Songs of an age, a movement, played against the more backbeat of Motown and the best of the Stones and Beatles and so many more.

            Jim Crow for many was not even on their minds. For others it was the way things ought to be. But then came marches, beatings, jail time and suddenly Jim Crow wasn’t. That was my generation. Who would have thought? The 18-year-old me certainly didn’t set out to be a part of changing the social landscape, but then I was a part of it.

            Vietnam. Aside from a few Quakers and other long-time advocates for peace, most Americans never questioned their government when it went to war. We defeated Fascism, at least in its 1930s form. We were faced with Communism. But then, a generation that was being sent to die began to ask questions. Not all, of course, but enough that ultimately a president decided he had had enough, ironically the same president who did much to end Jim Crow.

            The war in Vietnam finally would down. That was my generation. We created change most of us growing up never had thought about and suddenly, there we were, marching, carrying signs and, yes, voting. At least when we turned 21.

            BUT THEN, WE made a fatal mistake. Most of thought the work was done. Civil rights. Check it off as done. Stopping war. Check it off as done. The environment. Check if off as, if not done, as least begun. We went to work and went to sleep and so here we are today.

            Yet, I am thinking about hope. It is not a hope that I will be a part of the change I once was part of, born in the first year of the Baby Boomers. 

            Rather, it is a hope that younger generations, those just being born, those in school, those coming out into the world of work, will find their music, will find their causes and will go into the streets and into the voting booths and turn up the flames of compassion and yes, freedom. 

            I think, behind the headlines of the moment and the fears so many of us moving toward our use-by-dates, there is a restlessness in the land, the beginnings of a questioning. The beginnings of action.

            So, I listen to my music and visit my memories, and I find myself hoping that we were not a unique generation and that every generation has its moment when it has to step up and say “this is not right.” I have faith and hope in the youngsters among us.

            Catch the torch, kiddos, and sing and march on, kiddos. Just be sure you have some fun along the way! Dance in the streets to your music. Like we did, once upon a time.

                  Rich Heiland is a retired journalist and semi-retired consultant, trainer and public speaker. During his journalism career he was a reporter, editor, publisher, college instructor, part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team and a National Newspaper Association Columnist of the Year honoree. He also writes the intodementia.com blog about his family’s experience with dementia. He lives in West Chester, PA and can be reached at [email protected].