Hope or No Hope for Mom

My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer a few years back. It was a pretty stunning moment to hear that, I would never have guessed my Mom would ever be diagnosed with any disease. What was more amazing is that my mom had no hope. Hope was something for a lost cause, and my Mom pretty much told the doctor, "okay, what do we have to do to beat this?".



And beat it she did. Not with tears and why me? and hope for a miracle. Mom made her own path, she decided she was going to beat this and nothing was going to stop her. And nothing did, not the biopsy, the surgery, the chemo and the radiation. She calmly and purposefully took every step forward and beat cancer with a big stick. It's called determination, and hope has no place when you decide there will only be one outcome to a situation.



We had hope for my father in law when he had open heart surgery last March. We had hope that he would wake up and be taken off all those machines and be okay. Then we started to hope he'd be somewhat okay, and need dialysis 3 times a week. And then hope was gone, and so was Dad. They told Dad that he did not have long to live a good 30 years ago, and he laughed at them. He didn't hope for the best, he plowed through life after they took his leg, after they told him he had a kidney problem, after the many diagnosis that he was not long for this world. As long as Dad had determination, he was going to be fine. And being on machines during surgery took away Dad's ability to determine his own outcome, he didn't give up, he fought through his unconsciousness until the machines drained him of life. Hope didn't work for us.



So I wonder at the idea that my mother is leaning toward voting for Barack Obama. He has hope. McCain simply does the job, just like my mother does, just like my father in law did until the doctors took away his ability to fight. The media is taking away McCain's ability to fight, methodically ignoring any positive news on McCain and slanting every report against him, while blowing sunshine up Obama's ass and never asking him a real question that might cast a negative light upon his hope. Somehow, I know Dad is up there routing his butt off for John McCain.



Barack Obama's insistance that Hope and Change are our saviours is completely wrong. It's passive. John McCain, a man who has been physically battered and broken and still has his fighting spirit, his determination, doesn't have hope he can lift up America and the world. He knows he can, because he doesn't hope. For McCain, success is the only outcome. And if you'd just stop listening to the verbal blather and research both of their backgrounds, their challenges and successes, how one man relied upon others to carry him through while the other merely dragged himself to the top, you might decide that a tough old white man really would make a good president. Because he does not hope, he simply does the work. That makes all the difference.