Day 29: How to Keep a Hope-Filled Perspective

A quarter century filled with hope.

Dec 29, 2024

Can you believe that we’ve lived through twenty-five years since the turn of the century and new millennium? I can’t. In so many ways, it feels like we were just talking about the Y2K bug yesterday. Twenty-five years is a long time and a single moment all wrapped up into one.

Twenty-five years ago, I was forty-four years old and living in Flint, Michigan. I co-owned a software training business and was co-authoring computer software books. My mother was still alive. I was in a different relationship than I am now, and so many of the things that make me who I am today had not yet happened: several of my favorite jobs, fourteen years of marriage to an incredible woman, an MFA, and two published memoirs, to name a few. A lot of life happens in twenty-five years.

Chances are fairly high that I won’t live to see the half-century mark. That being said, I know a growing number of people who have lived into their 90s. In fact, I wrote about one the other day: a chance encounter with a 100-year-old—100 years and seven months to be precise (isn’t it interesting that counting months is important with infants and centenarians alike?). If you haven’t read it, I promise you’ll be inspired by this woman’s fortitude and life view.

Day 22: A Realistic Hope

Annette Marquis

December 23, 2024

A couple weeks ago, I sat in my oncologist’s office waiting for a phlebotomist to call me in before my six-month checkup. Growingly frustrated that people who came in after me were getting called in, while I was not, I barely noticed when a woman sat down next to me. When I grunted in reply to her friendly greeting, she promptly got up and moved a coupl…

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However, after three bouts of full-on cancer (endometrial and two breast cancers) and two carcinomas, I know my body is a little too friendly with cancer cells to believe I’ll live twenty-five more years. At the same time, I like to consider the long view. I’d love to be that 100-year-old woman I wrote about. And who knows? It could happen. Every day we’re seeing advances in regenerative medicine, cancer prevention and treatment, anti-aging therapies, and organ cloning that could significantly extend human lifespans. Maybe you and I will be the beneficiary of these advances.

Regardless of whether I’ll personally see the dawn of 2050, I believe it’s important to imagine it. It’s especially important as we head into 2025, which I’ve heard referred to as “the coming dark times.” If we only focus on the next year, or the next four years, it’s too easy for worry and anxiety to spiral out of control. But if we take the longer view, it’s possible to be hopeful. Change—good or bad—no matter how fast it feels sometimes, is incremental and slow.

Today, I’d like to remind you of some of the amazing things that have happened in the past twenty-five years—most of which we never saw coming when, on December 29th, 1999, we were fretting about the impending global melt-down that the Millenium Computer Bug might cause.

Of course, the first few years of the new century were colored by the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq. Not exactly hopeful times, especially since the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan lasted twenty of this twenty-five-year period.

And then in 2020, we lived through a global pandemic, which changed the course of human history. Approximately 6.87 million deaths worldwide (1.2 million in the U.S.) are attributed to the virus. Even life expectancy went down during this period.

These tragedies, however, don’t mean incredible advancements weren’t happening in other spheres. Here are a few of them:

In 2003, the Human Genome Project was completed, mapping all the genes in human DNA. This milestone revolutionized medicine and biotechnology, paving the way for countless medical advances that we’re only beginning to benefit from.
Facebook started in 2004, YouTube in 2005, and Twitter in 2006. Regardless of what you think about social media, it has changed our world, and in some cases, for the better, by revolutionizing communication and information sharing across the globe and within your own family and network of friends.
In 2007, Nancy Pelosi became the first female Speaker of the House, marking a milestone in gender representation in U.S. politics.
In 2008, Barack Obama was elected the first African American President of the United States, and then something very few of us saw coming or believed possible, was re-elected in 2012.
Kamala Harris was elected the first female, African American, and South Asian Vice President of the United States in 2020, and, in 2024, became the first woman of color to run as a major party’s candidate for president.
In the early 2000s, state-level recognition and growing public support for LGBTQ+ equality grew, culminating in the 2003 Supreme Court decision striking down sodomy laws, repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy in 2010, the Supreme Court’s recognition of same sex marriage in 2015, and the 2020 Supreme Court ruling that said that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects employees from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Although we’re already seeing a roll-back of some rights for LGBTQ people at the state level, we currently have federal protections that we never imagined possible in our lifetimes.
In 2010, the Affordable Care Act became law expanding healthcare access to millions of uninsured Americans, prohibiting denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions, and advancing public health equity.
The Black Lives Matter Movement brought national attention to systemic racism and police brutality resulting in the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and a number of state-level reforms.
In 2020, the Supreme Court upheld the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) protecting thousands of undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children from deportation.
The passage of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act allocated billions to green energy and climate resilience, marking the largest climate investment in U.S. history.

That’s a lot of positive change! And I know I missed a ton of things. Of course, I intentionally left out many of the negative things because I wanted to highlight the positive changes that often get buried in bad news. I believe that it’s up to each of us to search for the positive news instead of staying mired in the doom and gloom of TV pundits and opinion writers.

It’s by knowing from whence we’ve come that we can remain hopeful for the future. There have been other troubling times in our history—take the start of the 21st century as an example—and yet, positive developments both large and small still occurred in those times. That’s because good people did not give up working for change.

Despite the “dark days” ahead, I have no reason to doubt that we’ll see a significant number of positive developments over the next twenty-five years, too. We have to keep hopeful, however, and, in order to do that, we have to apply what we know and what we’ve learned about hope this past month to ensure that those changes happen.

In tomorrow’s post, the finale of Thirty Days of Hope, I’ll focus on what’s likely to happen in the next twenty-five years and how holding on to hope can make a difference in the next year and beyond.

Today’s Reflections

List other positive things that happened since 2000 that impacted your life in some way.

Did you do anything, big or small, to have an impact on any of the positive changes listed? If so, what was it? Why did you decide to contribute some of your energy to that particular issue or advancement? Is this still an important issue for you?

Think about what you might do over the next year to see that this change is protected or even expanded.

With hope in my heart,

Annette