You Can't Erase Hope - PPC

Pencils and Pop Culture: You Can’t Erase Hope

I had a lot on my mind sitting down to write this week’s “Pencil and Pop Culture,” since frankly, it’s not the happiest time in the pop culture world.

You don’t need my take on what happened last week in Colorado – there are many well-informed news sources that can give you that information, and anything I could add would be hackneyed or trite. But I will say that it’s had me feeling a little blue, and a little frightened, and that I’ve been hugging my family, friends and students a lot tighter this week.

Which got me thinking about hope. It’s easy when something like this happens to mire yourself in endless reports that detail what happened every terrifying second in that movie theater, and that gets to your soul pretty quickly. But the amazing thing that gets me every time that tragedy occurs is the stories of hope, community and love that rise in the aftermath, and Aurora is no exception.

My paths crossed very briefly in college with a young woman who was in the midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” that fateful night. She was shot in the head, but miraculously, it looks like she is going to make it through this ordeal with much of her faculties and capacities intact. Family and friends started an indiegogo campaign to help cover the cost of her medical expenses and those of her mother, whose cancer has returned.

The campaign started four days ago with the goal of raising $250,000 in forty days. As of this writing, they’ve raised $177,686, most of it from donations under $100.

There are a lot of terrible things in this world, but the spirit of hope and community triumph more often than we might think. Our 24-hour-news-cycle world often highlights the bad, and the good often slips through the cracks, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

I was shopping for some cheap party decorations at a local dollar store the other day, when at the checkout counter the sales associate asked me if I’d be willing to donate a dollar toward purchasing school supplies for children in military families.

“Which supply would you like to purchase?” she chirped, gesturing toward a rack of brightly-colored binders, cheerful markers and crisp ruled paper. Given my affinity for graphite, I selected a box of pencils and smiled as she slipped them into a school supply box.

I thought about those pencils as I made my way to the parking lot. A pencil is such a small thing in the grand scheme of things, but how many lives have changed because of them? I thought about campaigns like “Pencils of Promise,” which sells pencils and pencil art to raise funds to build classrooms and educate children throughout the world. I thought about the suffrage letters I visited many years ago, and how women built action and equality through scribbling on graphite. And I thought about the artists, writers and composers I’ve met over the past year as part of this passionate pencil community, and how they use art to inform, to illuminate, to heal, and to ultimately build a better world.

Whether it’s a pencil given to a child, or $5 given to a cause close to your heart, hope comes in all sizes. And I truly believe that hope wins out in the end. This week, I invite you to share the stories of hope and community that have touched your life. Keep the conversation going. In sharing your story, you may just give hope to others.

Photo credit: Stock.Xchng/MichaelAW