The major villains get all the attention:
The Eye of Sauron,
Emperor Palpatine,
Voldemort,
Characters so irredeemably evil
They have little to teach us in their remote power
Because we feel we'll never be like them.
But consider the lesser villains:
Denethor,
Saruman and Dooku
(Both played by Christopher Lee)
And Lando Calrissian in betrayal mode in Empire
And all the toadies like Wormtail and Umbridge
Who throw in their lot with the Death Eaters.
What do they all have in common?
They have lost hope in goodness,
In right prevailing.
They think their only hope,
Such as it is,
Is in joining with the enemy,
Being realistic,
Throwing their lot in with the winning side.
But the Frodos, the Gandalfs, the Lukes, the Obi Wans,
The Harry Potters,
Of our tales
Never lose hope.
They don't cling to optimism.
They know they may lose,
That evil may triumph in the end.
But they never lose hope
Because though you cannot control ends,
Your own ability to aspire to right action
Means hope is in the action
Not in your mind.
To behave as though the right will win out in the end,
Even when you are certain it will fail,
That is hope.
To be hopeless
Becomes a form of villainy,
Whether you join the bad guys or not.
At the very least,
Hopelessness
Stops right action at its source,
Stops your light from shining in the darkness,
Stops your voice from sounding clear in the cacophony.
But to act on hope,
To act as if your actions matter,
To act as if our voices will be heard,
To shine your light and trust that it will
Not only pierce the darkness
But inspire other lights,
Is to have lived well
No matter how things turn out.
Hopeless people join in
And build Orthanc
And Death Stars
And try to preserve their own little patch of freedom
At the expense of others.
Hope scrambles across the shattered landscape near
Mount Doom
Or flies a desperate trip down
A Death Star trench
Or simply walks across a bridge
They said not to cross.
For of course, these stories
Are not just found in fictional epics.
To live in hope isn't to think
Things will turn out right,
But to believe that standing for
The Good
Is always worth it in the end.
