[Originally published in the Monroe News on November 6, 2020]
“Hope is like the sun, if you only believe in it when you can see it, you’ll never make it through the night.” This is a quote from Princess Leia. If you don’t know who she is, don’t go looking through your geography textbooks to find out for which country she is royalty, you won’t find it. This is Princess Leia from the Star Wars saga. If you haven’t seen the movies or read any of the books, or you just dislike them, forgive me.
I love the quote though. “Hope is like the sun…” I think hope is a worthy topic for us to be talking about as human beings any day of the week. It is something we struggle with. It is something our stories and our histories are full of. It is almost certainly something we yearn for. When we face tough times we especially like to shift our focus to things which give us hope. When in darkness, we want to see that light at the end of the tunnel.
Princess Leia spoke of hope because she was the leader of a rebellion against the Galactic Empire. She was leading a cause against all the odds to bring freedom to people she never met. Her fight was built on the idea of hope. How did her character come to such a bold resolve to continue onward in her goal despite all the odds? Its really quite a story. Did you know she witnessed her home planet being completely destroyed by the so-called “Death Star”. She had to endure her son being lost to the evils of the dark side and turn into the menacing villain Kylo Ren. She learned that her own father was the greatest villain of them all, Darth Vader. Despite all of these despair-inducing revelations in her life she led people forward in hope. She never gave up the fight.
