Читать книгу Peaceful Revolution - Paul K. Chappell - Страница 11

Throughout Peaceful Revolution I will share the evidence and experience that gave me realistic hope. I will also show that realistic hope can survive even when we have suffered enormously and our trust has been betrayed. Descent into cynicism and hopelessness is not inevitable for the person who has experienced unbearable pain. Historian Will Durant said that “those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle.”4

An example of someone who suffered much and became very gentle is the great American folk singer and social activist Woody Guthrie, one of the most hopeful people of the twentieth century. He said: “The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution, because, largely, about all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine.”5

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame called Guthrie the “original folk hero” who “transformed the folk ballad into a vehicle for social protest and observation.” Although he had little formal education and lived during an era of immense racism, Guthrie became a strong advocate for human rights and social justice. He wrote songs to inform people about the injustices ignored by our world. And during the despair of the Great Depression he used his music to remind people they should never give up. Despite his traumatic life experiences, he had hope a brighter future was possible and did not fall into the pit of cynicism, bitterness, and helplessness. Describing his childhood, Guthrie said:

[When my family’s] six bed-room house burned down … just a day or two after it was built … well right after that, my fourteen-year-old sister either set herself on fire or caught on fire accidentally. There’s two different stories got out about it. Anyway, she was having a little difficulty with her school-work, and she had to stay home and do some work, and she caught on fire while she was doing some ironing that afternoon on the old kerosene stove. It was highly unsafe and highly uncertain in them days, and this one blowed up and caught her on fire and she run around the house about twice before anybody could catch her. The next day she died. And my mother, that one was a little too much for her nerves … My mother died in the insane asylum at Norman, Oklahoma. Then about that same time, my father mysteriously for some reason or other caught on fire. There’s a lot of people say that he set himself on fire, others say that he caught on fire accidentally. I always will think that he done it on purpose because he lost all his money.6

After those tragic incidents, Guthrie and his siblings became orphans. He lived with a foster family at first, and then around the age of seventeen he began wandering across the country and working manual labor jobs. The Great Depression soon followed. Yet despite all this misfortune, he remained hopeful about life, humanity, and the future. No one can call him naive about suffering. His hope was based on a strong foundation of resilience and deep life experience—and that is why it was so powerful and capable of carrying him through so much adversity. He explained it this way:

I have hoped as many hopes and dreamed so many dreams, seen them swept aside by weather, and blown away by men, washed away in my own mistakes, that—I use to wonder if it wouldn’t be better just to haul off and quit hoping. Just protect my own inner brain, my own mind and heart, by drawing it up into a hard knot, and not having any more hopes or dreams at all. Pull in my feelings, and call back all of my sentiments—and not let any earthly event move me in either direction, either cause me to hate, to fear, to love, to care, to take sides, to argue the matter at all—and, yet … there are certain good times, and pleasures that I never can forget, no matter how much I want to, because the pleasures, and the displeasures, the good times and the bad, are really all there is to me. And these pleasures that you cannot ever forget are the yeast that always starts working in your mind again, and it gets in your thoughts again, and in your eyes again, and then, all at once, no matter what has happened to you, you are building a brand new world again, based and built on the mistakes, the wreck, the hard luck and trouble of the old one.7

Guthrie’s hope was even strong enough to help him survive betrayal—an especially painful and dangerous experience that can shatter our faith in humanity. Betrayal, whether in friendships or relationships, is among the most agonizing of human experiences. Can realistic hope survive the dagger of betrayal when it is thrust deep into our heart?

As a child I was terrified of my father. His violent behavior made me fear for my life, and I will never be able to express what it was like to be four years old and have the person I most trusted attack me and threaten to kill me. As my father’s psychological trauma consumed him, the person who was supposed to protect me continued to attack me unexpectedly. I felt betrayed by the man I had loved and admired through a child’s innocent eyes.

Because this sense of betrayal happened so early in my childhood, I spent most of my life unable to trust people. My experiences taught me the people closest to me will try to kill me. I truly believed trusting others meant putting my life at risk, and for many years I associated trust with being violently attacked. It has not been easy, but my journey has led me to a point where I can trust again.

My life and the lives of many others like Woody Guthrie demonstrate that trust and realistic hope are never beyond our reach, no matter how much we have been hurt. There is no easy answer to recovering from trauma and betrayal. Everyone’s path is different, and this book can help you along the path that leads to trust, realistic hope, and healing.