Hold Your Head Up: Hope and Fear

As mid quarter is fast approaching, the amount of music that I listen to per day has gone up immensely. Working on projects late into the night, I always have an earbud in my ear or a headset on my head. Rap is my favorite genre of music lately, and it has gotten me through a lot in the past year. Swim meets, tough projects, or even when I'm just feeling unmotivated or in need of something to get my head in the game. With rap being my favorite genre, I obviously listen to Eminem, but Macklemore has grown on me immensely as of late. People who base opinions off of one of his newer songs, Thrift shop, may think that he is a corny grown up who never matured. But he's not. I was intrigued after hearing him on the radio one day, so I looked what albums he had made on Google. His album The Language of My World stood out to me, so I started listening to it and realized he had much more talent than some of his newer songs showed.

Song number six, Hold Your Head Up, lasting four minutes and twenty-five seconds, became my favorite song and is still in my top three. Now, you might be wondering what this song has to do with hope, fear, and a little more than half a dozen pieces of literature. As soon as I started doing that teenager thing, where you zone out while listening to a song and don't pay attention to anything, I noticed that this song is filled with lyrics that are or are almost polar opposites of one another. Light and dark, burden and blessings, truth and lies. This song has it all. So as I'm listening to it, I key in to one line Macklemore (2005) sings specifically, "The brighter the light, the darker the shadow". The number of things you can obtain from this line of text is immense, but I derive one point specifically. The greater something you could earn is, the harsher the consequences for failure can be.

Say you have a math test. You have a decent grade, but if you aced this test, your grade would increase to an A. But guess what, if you don't do well on said test, then your grade would plummet to something beyond repair. There is a correlation between reward (light), and failure (darkness). It is the same when you are in a life in death situation. If you have a gun pointed towards you, and the person is about to shoot but gets distracted, what do you do? Do you lunge forward to disarm the man and possibly save your own life, or do you stand still and pray he has a change of heart? Well, some might say hope for life causes you to lunge at the man, while others might say fear of death would cause you to lunge forward.

To me, “Wool” by Hugh Howey made the biggest impact on me out of the stories we read. I finished the book at 10 pm at night, and I particularly remember just sitting there questioning truth, goodness, hope, fear, and censorship. Thinking back to that thought process, I remember being particularly caught up on why Holston had acted the way he had. Looking more closely, it seems that hope was the main affecting factor out of the two (hope and fear being the two). Like when Hugh Howey explains that “The first year without her, Holston had waited, buying into her insanity, hoping she’d come back” (22). Hope is what caused Holston to wait an entire year for his wife after she had cleaned the outside view. Then when Holston began to think about going out to find her, hope was still what caused him to do so. But even if fear had been replaced with this hope, the ends would have been similar or the same.

Well guess what, this entire time we have been debating as a class has been about the wrong things. This entire time we have been debating about which is more powerful, hope or fear. Don’t get me wrong, they are both completely different things, but we end up with the same or similar result(s) from either or. What we should be discussing is in what situations is hope more prevalent, and in what situations is fear more prevalent. Basically, in what situations does either take over? They end in similar ways, but when they take hold of us and how they do so is what I think we should be more interested in.

Starting with hope and then leading to fear, I would like to bring up my favorite story of the many we read. Kurt Vonnegut’s “All The King’s Horses” covers a game of chess (which is one of favorite board games) gone awry when a group of sixteen Americans become POW and are forced to duel a man by the name of Pi Ying for their lives. Colonel Kelly is not only one of the men captured, but his wife and two kids are there as well, making this situation all the more dire for him. Both Pi Ying and Kelly are the players deciding action, and both of them have 10 minutes to decide each turn.

An hour into the game, Kelly comes across the choice of sacrificing his son Jerry to save the rest of the group. Being a soldier, Kelly has been taught to be tough in these situations, his fear has been replaced with training, and so the only thing that is left is hope. Vonnegut explains hope in war and life in general when he states, “When human beings are attacked, x, multiplied by hundreds or thousands, must die--sent to death by those who love them most” and that “Kelly’s profession was the choosing of x” (17). It’s tough to think about this decision, being that he is sacrificing his son because of the hope of life for the rest of the remaining group. That same hope being the thing that I have repeatedly directly and indirectly correlated with light and goodness. Being the Christian I am, I will always do my best to focus on the positive in life and further in my belief of hope, but that doesn’t mean sacrifices aren’t necessary.

It is this hope that leads Kelly to his actions, as well as the same hope I have correlated with light and goodness in previous blogs, that takes hold in people in situations where they have time to sort through their beliefs and realize that they need to fight to the end. If their beliefs are based on positive emotions and goodness, and they have time to realize this, hope will be the more likely of the two to take hold. But, if they have focused on negativity and emotions such as greed and jealousy, or if they haven’t had time to think about their own beliefs, then they will turn towards fear.

For instance, Kelly’s wife Margaret has no power towards her own survival, the survival or her kids or husband, or the survival of the rest of the group as the game goes on. And as much as she cares about her own life, she is a parent. As my parents often tell my brother and I, they love me and care about me always, and will go to opposite ends of the earth to keep my brother and I safe. When his first piece was taken, Kelly listened as the Sergeant was taken to a back room and shot. Crying out of grief, he looked to his wife for comfort as he usually did, but instead he saw “...the fear and reproach in Margaret's eyes” (Vonnegut 10). His wife had been reduced to a emotionless wreck, trapped in her own world of worry from the fear of death, for her, her family, and the rest of the group.

You may be thinking to yourself, ‘Why didn’t she turn to hope, she had time to think about her beliefs, and she couldn’t possibly be so negative?’ It's because she doesn’t have time to think about it, as she has no control over the game and therefore can’t possibly predict anything as she doesn’t have psychic powers. And when something does happen, she won’t have time to think about what to do as anyone could be dragged immediately to the back room, that person could even be her. And so she had turned to fear, being that the only thing she has time to focus on is the things immediately around her that she can control. Also, with this situation having the lives of her sons on the line, fear leads her to being in an emotionless and hopeless tailspin of infinite proportions.

Major Barzov is a Russian major who stands watch as the game goes, making comments as if the people he is talking to are immature students and he is the professor. As much as I can’t stand him and think he is a butthead, he does make a good point, saying that “There isn’t a grain of luck in the game…” (Vonnegut 15). As much as he is right on luck being non existent, you can also correlate the point to differing between hope and fear, and when in what situations they take hold. Hope takes hold when you have time to mull over your beliefs and realize you need to be positive, while fear takes hold in situations where actions need to be made fast as well as when a person has time to think about their beliefs and realize negativity has always been their go-to thought process.

I have made points such as hope and fear being correlated with positivity and negativity, that we are stupid to arguing about which is stronger and that we should be discussing when and how they occur, and that Barzov is a butthead. Reading the entirety of this blog, you have learned my beliefs, and know that I am set in these beliefs and will be stubborn in the face of opposition.