Family Photo:
Hope

On Saturday, Calvin and Lawrence's bedtime story came from their children's Bible.

Noah's Ark is a strange children's Bible story:

Everybody was bad. God sent a flood to kill everybody, except one man's family was saved on a boat. Don't be bad...or maybe get a boat.

After the flood, God sent a rainbow to promise he'd never do that again. Your mileage may vary.

A few Genesis chapters later, God rains fire and brimstone down on Sodom and Gomorrah for being bad. He even turns Lot's wife into a pillar of salt just for looking back at the destruction.

Sodom and Gomorrah isn't in the children's Bible. Go figure.

At the end of the story, Calvin asked why the rainbow illustration only has four colors instead of the seven they learned in school (ROYGBIV). I said it's because that was the first rainbow, and there's been a lot of agile development since then to get to the rainbows we have today.

"Oh, that makes sense," Calvin replied, a little too quickly. I could imagine Calvin reciting that back word-for-word, so I backtracked to explain that was a joke about software development. Then we talked about artistic styles and the constraints of physical publishing.

"Where did Noah's ark land? Calvin asked.
"Mount Ararat," I answered.

"Can we visit there?"
"Yes," I said, "But maybe not right now. Israel and Iran are fighting. I don't quite know where Mount Ararat is, but I think it's somewhere between those two." ...Sometimes I talk too much.

Calvin got curious: "Why are Israel and Iran fighting?"

I said I didn't know why. I said they always seem to be fighting, and started to tell the story of Ishmael and Isaac (also not in the children's Bible), before remembering that Ishmael is the Arab patriarch and while Iran does have small Jewish and Arab populations, it's 100 million people are predominantly Persian, with Persian leaders.

I said sometimes people can fight for so long that it doesn't matter why it started. They just keep fighting because it's all they know.

Calvin mulled that over, then asked a question I wasn't prepared for: "Are kids being killed?"

I said I didn't know. It's possible. Both countries are lobbing bombs at each other. Humanity has this miraculous rocket technology, and sometimes we use rockets do good things, like putting satellites in orbit, and sometimes we use rockets to do bad things, like leveling apartment buildings. I told Calvin we're safe from that, he doesn't have to worry about bad things happening where we live, but yes in some places where there are bombings sometimes kids are in those places.

"When will they stop fighting?"

I said I didn't know. Sometimes when people decide to fight, they're the only ones who can decide when to stop.

"What we can do for those kids?"

What can we do? I wasn't prepared for that question either. What can we do from a continent away, when people we don't know are fighting for reasons we don't know, and maybe kids are getting hurt?

I said we can hope, and I said we can pray. So we prayed for the kids in Israel. We prayed for the kids in Iran. We prayed they'd be safe, and maybe they'd grow up to know a world where they weren't fighting each other.

After Calvin and Lawrence fell asleep, I opened my phone to find out where exactly Mount Ararat is. That's how I found out the US had just dropped bombs on 3 nuclear sites in Iran.

As of today, June 27th, there's a ceasefire between Israel and Iran. I'm skeptical one stealth bomber raid finished an international conflict that's festered for 45 years. I'm skeptical Iran's nuclear program has been "obliterated". I'm skeptical the government that started a trade war and has fallen flat on its face attempting to make "90 deals in 90 days" will be effective at securing nuclear peace. I don't know if the world is now safer or more chaotic than it was before.

But I know what I hope.

Dad Joke:
Too Much Hope

Source: Reddit

Highlights:
To Hope Well

What’s The Use of Hope? by Kieran Setiya

Hope is difficult to place. By conventional wisdom, hope is empowering, noble, even audacious. In the face of threats to democracy and the slow catastrophe of climate change, we are told, it is vital not to give up hope. Yet as an episode of the sitcom Ted Lasso reminds us: “It’s the hope that kills you.” To hope is to risk the agony of defeat. And what good does hope do as things fall apart around us?
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One can be excessively hopeful, inflating the odds or refusing to give up when possibilities are so distant they should vanish. Or one can be too hopeless, minimising chances or discounting risks that may be worth a shot. Virtue lies between these two extremes. To hope well is to be realistic about probabilities, not to succumb to wishful thinking or be cowed by fear; it is to hold possibilities open when you should. The point of clinging to possibility is not to feel good – hope may be more painful than despair – but to keep the flicker of potential agency alive.

The virtue of hoping well is a matter of conviction, of standing with or searching for the truth, attending to what’s possible. And it’s a matter of will, the courage to conceive alternatives, even when it’s not clear what to do. This is how we should approach life’s hardships, finding possibility where we can: the prospect of flourishing despite infirmity, of finding one’s way through loneliness, failure, grief, confronting the injustice and absurdity of the world. The question is not whether we should hope, but what we should hope for.

The Role My Parents Never Expected: Raising My Sister’s Kids by Frances Dodds

People have asked my mom: When you had five kids, didn’t you think something would go wrong with at least one of them? She told me this incredulously, her eyes wide. It doesn’t matter how many children you have. When you grow a baby in your own body, watch her take her first steps and say her first words, you don’t fathom the odds that her life will become a nightmare. No one can live that way.

But now, with the grandkids, my parents do fathom the odds. They know what the kids are up against — having two parents with addictions, all the trauma of early-life insecurity and abandonment. “If any of the children end up struggling with addiction, we just want them to have all the tools and love in the bank to prepare them for the fight,” my dad told me. “So that’s what we’re focusing on now. They’ve been given to us for a time, but it’s a very short time, really. I mean, in our span of life, it feels like a lot. But in their lives, it’s a very short time. And then they’re going to choose their own path.”

It’s the kind of insight I’ll try to hold on to, as I become a parent. And even though I wish, desperately, that everything were different, there is something oddly comforting about raising a child at the same time as my parents. They haven’t been given the luxury of settling into old age, letting their views and interpretations of the past harden like fossils. They are in the thick of it, asking the big questions all over again: How do you raise children to be brave? How do you teach them right from wrong, or danger from safety, without filling them with fear? How do you make them feel special but not better than anyone? How do you push them to believe in their own potential without setting them up to fall short of expectations? How do you love them into loving themselves?

But in the end, if there’s one thing I’ve gathered from watching my parents raise children, it’s what a crushing, life-giving contagion hope can be. In recent years, my dad has talked about that I Corinthians passage everyone reads at weddings. And now, these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. “Love is the big one,” my dad says, “but people don’t pay much attention to hope. Even though it’s there all the time, right behind love.”

As of this writing, my sister has been clean for almost two months. She’s going to multiple meetings a day, is deep in her 12-step work with two sponsors. It’s the most progress she has made in years. When this stint of sobriety began, my parents kept saying, “She really seems willing this time.” But I confess that I didn’t have much hope. I was frustrated, so tired of watching them suffer.

Then, as I was getting ready for a baby shower my friends were hosting for me, I got a text from an unknown number. It was L. My stomach twisted, waiting for the hammer to drop. But she didn’t ask for money, or anything else. She just sent a meditation from a Native American elder on women being the givers of life. “The Earth Mother gives songs to the Woman to sing. These songs are about life, about beauty, about children, about love, about family, about strength, about caring, about nurturing, about forgiveness, about God.”

And there it was — a spark, hope catching. It does burn fast, if you let it.

Father’s Day Speech by Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) June 18th, 2008

We should take all of these steps to build a strong foundation for our children. But we should also know that even if we do; even if we meet our obligations as fathers and parents; even if Washington does its part, too, we will still face difficult challenges in our lives. There will still be days of struggle and heartache. The rains will still come and the winds will still blow.

And that is why the final lesson we must learn as fathers is also the greatest gift we can pass on to our children — and that is the gift of hope.

I’m not talking about an idle hope that’s little more than blind optimism or willful ignorance of the problems we face. I’m talking about hope as that spirit inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better is waiting for us if we’re willing to work for it and fight for it. If we are willing to believe.
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And what I’ve realized is that life doesn’t count for much unless you’re willing to do your small part to leave our children — all of our children — a better world. Even if it’s difficult. Even if the work seems great. Even if we don’t get very far in our lifetime.

That is our ultimate responsibility as fathers and parents. We try. We hope. We do what we can to build our house upon the sturdiest rock. And when the winds come, and the rains fall, and they beat upon that house, we keep faith that our Father will be there to guide us, and watch over us, and protect us, and lead His children through the darkest of storms into light of a better day. That is my prayer for all of us on this Father’s Day, and that is my hope for this country in the years ahead. May God bless you and your children. Thank you.

The Future Will Have to Wait by Michael Chabon

If you ask my eight-year-old about the Future, he pretty much thinks the world is going to end, and that’s it. Most likely global warming, he says—floods, storms, desertification—but the possibility of viral pandemic, meteor impact, or some kind of nuclear exchange is not alien to his view of the days to come. Maybe not tomorrow, or a year from now. The kid is more than capable of generating a full head of optimistic steam about next week, next vacation, his tenth birthday. It’s only the world a hundred years on that leaves his hopes a blank. My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. He sees himself as living on the last page, if not in the last paragraph, of a long, strange and bewildering book. If you had told me, when I was eight, that a little kid of the future would feel that way—and that what’s more, he would see a certain justice in our eventual extinction, would think the world was better off without human beings in it—that would have been even worse than hearing that in 2006 there are no hydroponic megafarms, no human colonies on Mars, no personal jetpacks for everyone. That would truly have broken my heart.

When I told my son about the Clock of the Long Now, he listened very carefully, and we looked at the pictures on the Long Now Foundation’s website. “Will there really be people then, Dad?” he said. “Yes,” I told him without hesitation, “there will.” I don’t know if that’s true, any more than do Danny Hillis and his colleagues, with the beating clocks of their hopefulness and the orreries of their imaginations. But in having children—in engendering them, in loving them, in teaching them to love and care about the world—parents are betting, whether they know it or not, on the Clock of the Long Now. They are betting on their children, and their children after them, and theirs beyond them, all the way down the line from now to 12,006. If you don’t believe in the Future, unreservedly and dreamingly, if you aren’t willing to bet that somebody will be there to cry when the Clock finally, ten thousand years from now, runs down, then I don’t see how you can have children. If you have children, I don’t see how you can fail to do everything in your power to ensure that you win your bet, and that they, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, will inherit a world whose perfection can never be accomplished by creatures whose imagination for perfecting it is limitless and free. And I don’t see how anybody can force me to pay up on my bet if I turn out, in the end, to be wrong.

Written by Michael Chabon...Originally published in 02006.

The Red Hand Files #190 by Nick Cave

Dear Valerio,

You are right to be worried about your growing feelings of cynicism and you need to take action to protect yourself and those around you, especially your child. Cynicism is not a neutral position — and although it asks almost nothing of us, it is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils.

I know this because much of my early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt. It was a position both seductive and indulgent. The truth is, I was young and had no idea what was coming down the line. I lacked the knowledge, the foresight, the self-awareness. I just didn’t know. It took a devastation to teach me the preciousness of life and the essential goodness of people. It took a devastation to reveal the precariousness of the world, of its very soul, to understand that it was crying out for help. It took a devastation to understand the idea of mortal value, and it took a devastation to find hope.

Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, Valerio, such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.

Love, Nick