ABPA - Australian Bush Poets Association

A couple of years ago I wrote an article for the Age (published 29/12/12), and provided a link to it from this site. Although it's not poetry, given the horrific events in Sydney and Pakistan, I thought it might be worth reprinting it here. It's based on a letter written in 1897 by an eight-year-old girl, Virginia O'Hanlon, to the editor of a New York newspaper seeking reassurance that Santa Claus actually existed. The reply written by the editor (Francis P. Church), with its philosophical underpinnings, has remained popular ever since. I took that idea and recast it as an editor responding to a teenage girl who was questioning whether there was any hope for the future.

Cheers (and best wishes to all for Christmas and the New Year)
David

Yes Virginia, there is hope for the future

(with apologies to Francis P. Church)

Dear Editor

I am 16 years old. Some of my friends say that life sucks and there is no hope for the future. With all of the terrible things happening in the world I, too, am beginning to doubt. Tell me the truth...is there any hope?

Virginia

Virginia, your friends are wrong. They have fallen victim to the despair that haunts our troubled times, a cynicism born of the suffering that results from hunger and disease, hatred and prejudice, and the destruction wrought by war and conflict. We cannot ignore these things, Virginia, for they are part of the everyday lives of so many people...but neither should we accept their inevitability, for to do so is to deny that we have the capacity to eliminate them.

In this great cosmos of ours we are mere insects as compared to the boundless miracle about us, as measured against the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge. It is here that the future lies, Virginia...in the slow, stumbling steps that we take towards understanding this universe and our relationship to it. And within that future, within the limitless potential of our minds, there is the opportunity to overcome all that is wrong with our little world.

Yes, Virginia, there is hope. It exists in our imagination, in our curiosity, in the unceasing quest to expand the limits of what we know and understand. It exists in love and compassion and generosity and devotion, in all those things that give to life its highest beauty and greatest joy. You may find it in your family and friends, in art, music, literature, science, nature, or in any one of the thousands of moments that make up your daily life. It is there, Virginia...all you have to do is recognise it.

How dreary the world would be if there were no hope! Without it there would be no sense of purpose, for we would be frozen in time and space as all our dreams turned to dust. Listen to your friends by all means, but do not follow them blindly. To do that is to admit defeat and turn away from the challenges that we face. Such a course of action would not find a path through the ongoing financial crises or seek answers to the many questions being asked about climate change. All it would do is acknowledge that we will be forever condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past.

I do not pretend that the journey is easy, Virginia, or short. Those terrible things that you and your friends see on a daily basis are a reminder that, despite the vast technological resources at our command, we are still a primitive people. Our actions are equivalent to those of children taking their first few clumsy steps in life. What is yet to come for the human race is so vast and unknowable that it is almost impossible to put into perspective. Perhaps it will help if you consider that all of man’s recorded history on this planet is no more than a single grain of sand from all the beaches of the world. What, then, might lie ahead of us?

Think on that. Remember what has happened in your own lifetime and reflect on its wonders, on all that has been created in the age of your parents and grandparents. Then consider what future generations will make of our comparative barbarism.

Therein lies our hope, Virginia...in constantly striving to understand our problems and overcome them, in seeking solutions. There are men and women all over the world at this very minute who are striving to do exactly that. Our relatively unformed, brutish minds must develop in order to accommodate different cultures and beliefs, to accept the essential right of every child to have the opportunity to achieve the very best that life can offer. Believe in that vision. Cling to it with every fibre of your being so that your friends, and the friends of your friends, can understand what it means and what we might become.

That is our future, Virginia. That is our hope.

© David Campbell, 2012

You have certainly made a very eloquent transposing of the original into your article.

Sadly, there are a lot of people without hope in Australia. In the year that you wrote that, David, 129 young Australians between age 15 to 19 took their own life.

The average number of Australians dying by their own hand is on average of over 6 each day, that's about 2500 each year. 2500 Australians dying in despair !!!! 5000 losing hope in the last two years. Will that be 7500 by the end of 2015, or more !

Those figures play on my mind, it is an horrendous tragedy.

I wish I could share your optimism for the humanist utopia but I think that sort of optimism failed somewhere between 1914 and 1918.

I think you have to be optimistic, or you just can't get out of bed in the morning, but it is always a challenge.

One of my major sources of frustration is our difficulty acknowledging the way our own minds work. Mental health treatment seems to be going backwards in this country at the moment.

Take the events in Sydney this week. I heard the perpetrator's lawyer talking on the radio. He had some truly shocking things to say. One was that his client had been extremely traumatised after both his body and his cell walls had been smeared with excrement during a recent prison stay.

I am not for one moment suggesting this caused the terrible events in Martin Place this week, yet can anybody say for sure that it didn't tip the balance? Sure, we want to punish criminal behaviour, but do we want prisons to be returning people to society in an even more damaged position and, presumably, posing an even greater risk?

We used to have a prison chaplain in Melbourne, Father Peter Nordern, who was a lone voice in favour of prison reform. He spoke with great eloquence and compassion. Since his retirement, however, nobody has filled the void. Meanwhile, the prison system has been privatised at the same time as the overcrowding would appear to have continued apace. I would suggest that prisons have become more, not less, brutal in Melbourne over the last couple of decades. Yet there would appear to be no votes at all in prison reform. No party every mentions it during election campaigns - not even the Greens, that I can recall.

I do feel sometimes that we most definitely reap what we sow, and it makes it very hard to be optimistic about the future.

It is probably fair to say that human progress is not linear. We make great strides, then we slip backwards. We just have to hope that the backwards slip does not wipe out all of the previous gain. It probably doesn't, but it's hard to always hold that thought in your mind.

I'm obviously with Stephen, Neville...without optimism there'd be nothing to energise all the people who are striving, in one way or another, to improve the situation. Human progress is, as Stephen says, not linear, but probably a good example of chaos theory. Little things can cause change in major, but unexpected ways. And it's often only well after the event that it's possible to determine if the step taken was backwards, forwards, or sideways.

One of the current dilemmas in society is that modern communication, being global and instant, brings very bad news from across the world immediately and graphically to our attention. And the media is always attracted to the bad before the good, which can be overwhelming and very depressing.

But among other things, I like to hope that the words we write, whether poetically or otherwise, might cause a tiny ripple 'out there', might bring a smile or a thought that brightens someone's day, or provides some useful insight into the human condition. That's one reason why I get out of bed in the morning.

Cheers
David

David Campbell wrote:And the media is always attracted to the bad before the good, which can be overwhelming and very depressing.

Good point. It gets worse, our professors at Yooni used to call it : "deviance amplification " a fancy phrase that means media beat up, putting an impression in the public's mind that may well be false, and even creating trouble where trouble didn't really exist.

Nevertheless I'm afraid I remain pessimistic.

Ah well, Neville, I am optimistic that you won't remain pessimistic forever...

There's good in the world if you look for it. Often the best is brought out by the worst. You make of the world what you will.

Heather

Yes there's some good in the world if we work hard at it. the bad just emerges without any effort at all.

The problem we face is that we are now ruled in just about all areas by " leaders " that appear to be moral cowards. That spells doom.