Opinion

Hope gets us through the night

Alex Wukman
opinion columnist

Itis Saturday afternoon. A 70-strong crowd, made up of representatives from some of the more moderately liberal activist groups, marches down South 75th Street slinging signs, brandishing banners and shouting slogans, all demanding an end to a war that hasn't started. Reaching Tipps Park, they open up a salvo of speeches and songs -- trying to summon up the spirit of the 1960s, only to have it laughed at by the seven people who show up to protest the protest.

This leads to a few tense minutes as a cop car crawls between the growling groups, and a realization that when all the posturing, posing, preening and politicking is put aside, everyone is trying to cope with the same problem -- fear. 

No one here is whether those friends, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers of ours who bought into the American dream so thoroughly that they signed on the dotted line and were shipped off to learn how to die for their country will be home for their next birthday.

So we look for security, sanctuary and safety where we can find them. Some place their faith in the party line coming down from Washington. Others seek solace in reactionary rhetoric. Some try to find the peace that lies between the beats on the dance floor, the god who hides in the bottom of the bottle, their missing mother in the arms of the lover they normally would never consider.

There are those who look at life with the eyes of the dead, who try to do everything -- see everything -- before death, destruction and disappearance. Poets, painters, pushers and prostitutes who put it all on the line for one last big bad blowout before everything goes up in flames.

The problem is that no one is sure that it will go up in flames. We are all sitting with baited breath and hunched shoulders, living in the second between the firing of the gun and the impact of the bullet and wondering where we will be when the balloon goes up and the bombs come tumbling down. But we know we have to go on living.

So we hide behind laughter, love and lies. We reason it away and say that the death and destruction won't be that bad, that it won't happen or that it will end in a couple of months.

But, in the darkness before the dawn, when the cold slips into the bottom of the soul and a hand searching for a lover hits on the bedis empty half, we let our defenses slip and slide away into the storm, cast our eyes to heaven looking for hope and a single moment of happiness in an unforeseeable future. All we find is the same thing we found last night and the same thing we'll find tomorrow night: the guarantee that we might make it through the next day.

Wukman, a junior creative writing major, can be reached at alex_wukman@hotmail.com.