Love in a hopeless place

Reading Sasha Fletcher's end times romance novel 'Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World' in the middle of... all this.

Many years ago we elected a guy president because he said we should all have HOPE. Hope for this and hope for that, hope that good things would happen again and hope that bad things would soon stop. A graffiti artist put the hope guy’s face on posters and college kids hung them in their dorm rooms. So we elected the hope guy president but oh whoops it turned out he forgot to clarify something pretty important which was that the hope he was talking about was only for banks and corporations and not us. Oh well. Nowadays he's retired. He vacations on a Greek island with Tom Hanks and we don't hear much from him about hope or anything else, really. 

We don’t hear about hope from anyone these days. Politicians don't even dangle it in front of us anymore. It used to be that politicians would travel around the country kissing babies and telling us all the things we could be hopeful about if we just promise to vote for them. “House prices are too high absolutely I agree and I will fix that mwahhh.” “There is too much traffic yes of course I feel your pain and I’ll add a lane to every highway in the country mwahhh.” They never ended up doing any of it but at least they lied and gave us hope. Now they just tell us no. We tell them what the vast majority of us wants and they say, “Sorry, no can do, Sport. We can't give you health care and we can't stop murdering children in the Middle East. I understand that's not what you want right now but it's all very complicated, you see. There are very specific reasons why little kids have to be murdered and why hospital bills should bankrupt you so deeply that even if you survive your treatment you’ll wish you were dead. These are very complex issues and you wouldn't understand. Better to let 20 octogenarian millionaires in Washington D.C. decide what’s best here but thank you for the vote and also can I have 20 dollars?”

Even now as we ask the D.C. millionaire oracles if we can, maybe, please, at least have a new person to vote for, someone young enough to still have hope left in them or who remembers what hope felt like or who is at least able to write the word hope backwards next to a clock we are told no. It is what it is.