Positivity: Hope for The Future
Like a lot of people I know, I have many concerns about the future.
Long buried ugliness has boiled back to the surface. After decades of progress in equality and fairness no matter your race, creed or color…the lunatic fringe is feeling re-empowered to attempt to be dominant once again.
They may have gained a voice in politics and will work to alter public policy…but we can make all of their efforts a struggle. They are NOT in the majority, I believe that the sane and rational are. We need to stand up to this madness and remind the misdirected that progress is a good thing, and we are not a monochromatic nation.
The thing is, maintaining positivity in the face of so much outright hate, incivility, rudeness and atrocious acts becoming common is a major challenge. Watching the hateful and spiteful being given positions of authority is upsetting, maddening, and depressing. It’s all too easy to lose hope, to hunker down and prepare for the worst, and to be afraid for the future.
But that’s exactly what they want. If we give in to the sadness and sink into the fear, they have already won. We don’t need the threat of foreign terrorists when our own leadership seeks to rule through fear. They are working to build their power – either by riling up their base by playing on their fears of change, or by causing progressive thinkers to fear for the future of equality and stepping backwards.
It is imperative that we remain vigilant, and that we do whatever we can legally do to keep the worst case scenarios from becoming reality. The thing is, we cannot do that by empowering them…we need to change our focus, and work instead on hope.
We need to act FOR the things we want, not AGAINST what we do not want. We cannot put all of our attention on our worst nightmares, because doing that empowers them, and that is exactly what we wish to avoid. We need to find hope where we can, to find positive actions that can be taken in order to resist the fear, and we need to work as hard as we can to make things better.
I don’t know what form this will take. I just know that if we meet hate with hate, anger with anger, negativity with negativity…we just foment more of it. If we want something greater than that, if we want to keep from totally falling into the abyss of the hatemongers, we need to find positive actions of resistance, and give more reasoned reason for people to join in.
I have hope. The future is not yet written. Let’s strive to write a good one.
Finding positivity is not hard, it just requires action. Knowing that the future has not occurred, we can strive to find positivity to work on building a better one. When we work with hope instead of fear, we empower ourselves. When we feel empowered, we often spread that feeling to others around us, and as such can build more positive feelings. We can use the positive feelings this generates to dissolve negative feelings. When we take away negative feelings, we open up space to let in positive feelings, and that is something we can be grateful for. Gratitude leads to happiness. Happiness is the ultimate positive attitude. Positive attitude begets positive energy, and that is always a good thing.
This is the one hundred forty-seventh entry of my Positivity series. It is my hope these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog and spread the positivity.
In relation to Positivity, check out my Five Easy Steps to Change the World for the Better.
