The quote “A Prisoner of Hope” is an excerpt of a longer quote by Cornel West:
“One must be a prisoner of hope…. [with] unconditional commitment to mustering the courage to think critically, speak freely; …the courage to try to keep track of the humanity of each and every person; the courage to love, serve, [and] sacrifice; and an unconditional commitment to fight for democracy in its substantive form.”
Those closing remarks have stuck with me throughout the years and have been a source of inspiration to which I turn whenever I feel overwhelmed by the state of world affairs.
I have been studying U.S. foreign policy for several years and have come to believe that we U.S. Americans would be outraged by and would summarily reject most of its government’s domestic and overseas actions if only we were more aware of what was really taking place in our name.
As it is now, we are kept in the dark, waiting 20 or 30 years for declassified documents of each crisis or event to become available. This lag helps us fall into our normal pattern where we feign apologies: “Oh, that’s ancient history. We can’t do anything about it now. Surely we’ve learned that lesson. Let’s move on.”
The purpose of this blog is to end this cycle by sharing my own thoughts on current events and then providing some research and bits of history that I’ve gathered to act as a framework for understanding the current situation. My hope is that understanding the past by looking at the historical record (esp. declassified documents) with honest eyes and avoiding the jingoist, “patriotic” and faith-based assumptions that often creep into the mainstream discourse, we can gain insights into current issues and find better, more informed ways of navigating the events of the present.
Please join me in the discussion. I’d love to hear your thoughts on anything I’ve posted here.
Thanks for reading.
Steve Huff
