Tags: cruel
Hope Is Cruel
By pencil leads on Feb 10, 2009 | In Reflections | 2 feedbacks »
'you are cruel. you gave her a hope that she could never reach. she would have been fine the way she was. but you came and gave her hope. if she never saw hope, she would have never known what is despair either.'
the above conversation, does it sound familiar to all of you visual novels fans (i am referring to fans who read VNs for their story and not for hentai only. for more details about VNs, go to my main site, games section)? if you do play VNs you would most likely come across this line.
i came across that few lines of conversation roughly 2 years ago when i was playing the game, and i could not get it out of my head even after so long. of course, i did not replicate word for word that conversation, since i depended on my memory from 2 years ago. regardless, the most important thing is that the main idea is still the same.
ok. so. what happened? this girl was suffering from many things since she was a kid, all the way till she grew up. a boy, without knowing fully her situation, gave her a hope that she could be free from her suffering. the girl had not held on to any hope, until that boy came and gave it to her. like the above said, it was a hope that she could never reach.
moral of the story? am i moving on to the moral of the story too fast? lolx. ok maybe i should say something more.
hope is cruel. this is the topic of my post. everyone knows, that we need hope to survive. he who has no hope has no purpose. he who has no hope cannot live life fully. we see people down and we give them hope. we see people struggle and we give them hope. correct? most of us do. but before we give them hope, maybe we ought to think a little bit more.
many people give others hope, even though they knew or maybe they knew not for certain that the hope can never come true, no matter how much he try, no matter how much he hope. for example, you tell a cancer patient that he would get better and recover. you tell a person whose beloved will wake up from a coma. maybe something near to us, you tell a person everything will be all right when you know it is not. familiar? very. i am sure most of you do that.
to give people hope knowing full well they cannot get it is not only cruel, it is downright irresponsible. you may think you do a good deed by giving people hope. you may think you helped him or her by giving her hope. but if you give a person an anticipation of something that will take more than a miracle to come true, then you are just deceiving yourself and the unlucky person. in the end, the one who suffer more would be the person you had encouraged.
or maybe, you give a person a hope that may be achieved through a lot of effort. but the thing is, you give him or her hope, and then you leave her alone. you did not help. all you did is to talk nice. if you give a person hope and leave him or her to struggle for her own, what is the use? you would be making him suffer more. the process may even backfire.
what does that makes us? hypocrites. again. i seemed to always use this word in my posts. i guess it must have become my favorite word. yes. talk and no action. talk without sparing a thought for others. talk and forget. we don't think of the consequences. he is down. we must encourage him. she is in despair. we must give her hope. so? what is the point if they had a hope they can never achieve? we cannot just talk, we must also pull them up. give them a reasonable hope. you don't tell a 4th stage cancer patient he will live on for a few more years. you don't tell the wife of a man who became a vegetable that he will wake up.
of course, i admit hope is neccessary for life. without hope there is no life. but what i want to say is, if you want to give people hope, give them the right kind of hope. a hope which can be attained. a hope which could drive them to move on, not to drive them into further despair. extreme example: you convinced the wife of a man in a coma that he will surely wake up. she believes you. the next day, he died. tell me, what would the wife feel? sad before you gave her hope. sadder after you gave it to her.
moral of the story? i think i got the moral and the main story mixed together in one lump. regardless, there is one hope we can always trust. that is Jesus Christ our Lord. because to Him, impossible is nothing (my favorite addidas phrase!). He will not give you the wrong kind of hope, and what He said, will happen, because He don't lie. Because He is not a hypocrite.
remember, hope is cruel, and the person who give the hope is a cruel and downright irresponsible hypocrite if he do not give the right kind of hope and drive people further down into despair. giving hope is not neccessary doing a good deed, giving the right kind of hope is. also, when you give people hope, it is for their sake, not for your own sake of 'oh i did a good deed today!' mentality.