There Is Hope

poor georgie’s almanack:

HOPE:

When it seems your life, your country, or your world is beyond saving, you might turn to booze, drugs, food, prayer, or all of the above. I find solace in this deteriorating T-Shirt. It is swag from a Presidential Bill Clinton, George Bush and Ross Perot in East Lansing, Michigan, USA.

Here is the back story. Since 1980, I have been behind the scenes at many of those Presidential and VP debates that are broadcast the month before America’s national elections. I've been part of a non-partisan team that produces the world’s most important TV reality shows. Each debate generated totally unexpected events that deeply touched my heartstrings, that scared the daylights out of me, or tickled my funny bone.

In October 1992, for instance, I was a liaison with news media at the debate hosted by Michigan State University. After a long C-SPAN interview in the auditorium where the debate was to occur, I checked on the crowd outside waiting to enter the building.

Outside a ferocious, freezing, high-velocity Midwest blizzard raged.

The doors were about to be opened for a couple hours so "locals" could shuffle in, see the candidates

podiums, the moderators desk, the cameras and then look up into the balcony where the networks temporary anchor booths with flimsy walls of drapes were getting their finishing touches.

Then, the doors would shut, so the Secret Service and their dreaded, drooling dogs, could “sweep” the area and hermetically seal-off the site from anyone who didn’t have a very heavily-vetted access pass.

Bundled up to, and over, my gills, I was figuratively and literally blown away … both by the howling wind and by the blocks-long line of people of all ages waiting for hours to enter.

An elderly woman was clutching what looked, through my foggy and rapidly freezing glasses, to be a bundle of rags. Actually, she was clutching an array of baby blankets sheltering her nearly-new granddaughter.

Why, I asked, do you punish yourself to bring out this infant who would never remember the moment?

Because, she said, "This is important. This is history. And when the baby is old enough to understand, I will show her news stories from this day and tell her that she was a part of America's continuing story."

“It is important. It is history," she emphatically repeated.

I don’t know her name. But, I do know she made me cry, right there on the Michigan tundra. There is hope, I thought, always hope. And always it is for and about the kids. They embody our hope.

Thus, for a quarter century when, just like tonight, doom and gloom darken the moon, I’ve been donning this fading battered T-Shirt and hoping that it, and the hope it represents, lasts much longer than I will.

May 14, 2018.