Hope and Nobility

What is hope? What is nobility?

Nobility? It's not the fake kind with titles, but the real kind that actually matters. Nobility of the spirit -- nobility in the sense of that rareness of human nature that rises about the common, the ordinary, the mundane, the everyday.

With all due apologies to every glittering generality that has ever been the moral of any film, and any tale that has ever been told of which Hollywood and Broadway and Stratford-upon-Avon have been exponents.... And with every bit of good faith from the majestic heights of the Fugues of Bach and the Symphonies of Beethoven and the glorious sounds of Copland and Gershwin, and the speeches of Jefferson and Lincoln and Kennedy and King....

With all that I ask, humbly, that may we remember:

Absolute perfection is for the Borg, and for the angels, but not for us.

We are told to fight for what is right, to fight for justice, to fight against the dying of the light, to give of ourselves, to never surrender and never retreat except where to do so lets us fight another day. We are told that love is greater than war, that humanity will conquer adversity, that hate must be defeated by love, that in the Manichean opposition of virtue and vice we must make our choice, and that this choice is ours to make of our free will.

In these troubled times, we are called to choose wisely, to give the devil his due, but no more, and above all, to have hope.

Where the future is concerned, I choose to have hope. For it is the noblest trait of all.