Hope this makes sense.

"For many months, we've been teased, even derided for talking about hope. But we always knew that hope is not blind optimism. It's not ignoring the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path.
It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it... Hope is the bedrock of this nation. The belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be." - Obama; Iowa caucus victory speech

Call me naive, call me foolish, but I have hope. Lately, people have been telling me to "face reality," that my dreams and the desires of my heart are "unrealistic ," that "life isn't some fairytale." And I honestly feel bad for those people who have become calloused because of pain. And yeah, its unfortunate that truly talented people never taste fame or that hard-working people lose their raise to someone who doesn't nearly try as hard as them or that people don't end up with the person they thought they were going to marry or that broken families and poverty and hate exist in our society. It sucks because we see and feel these things and we become cynical, and there's hardly any room for faith, hope, and love.

We lose faith in God, other people, and ourselves. Why? Because someone other than us has to be blamed. We blame God for war, poverty, death - then we lose faith in God. We blame people for hurting us - then we lose faith in those people and we hardly let anyone else in after that. But we'll hardly genuinely ever blame ourselves - and when we finally do, we lose faith in ourselves because we "let it happen in the first place" or it's too late or too big of a problem to fix on our own.

So then we lose hope, and cynicism directs our every emotion and action. We become pessimists and so now pessimism  is labeled reality. So you're telling me only one in a million will have a "happy ending" with their (fill in dream here). That makes 999,999 unhappy people. But I bet the only reason things never work out with those 999,999 people is because they needed hope that they didn't have. They give up halfway, assume the worst (you negative nancy's and lay-down larry's!), and they go down that road that was pretty much avoidable just by being optimistic. Don't be that person that believes that we are predestined to fail. Believe that you can do what you want to do, and hope in the Lord who will give you the grace to do it. "Take what you can, give nothing back!" (Sorry, I've been watching pirates of the caribbean)