Monsters and Hope (Part II)
Back in September, I wrote an essay on the first word of this series’ title. If you haven’t read my take on those monsters yet, I suggest starting there before diving into what’s next—a message I’d give to my young Haitian friends in Springfield if I had the chance to speak to them.
Also, to avoid the discomfort of thinking alone, please share this essay with others who might find it meaningful and add your own thoughts on hope in the comments box below.
If I left Haiti unsure whether hope or something else would meet me at the airport in Miami, I wasn’t wrong. I’d soon learn that promises don’t have to show up.
I’d visited Florida before, but this time was different: I had come to stay. It wasn’t the Miami Vice vibes I had imagined. What greeted me was something far more stark: an absence that scraped at my 110-pound body.
I arrived in America as Reagan’s Hollywood script neared its climax—a nation basking in Morning Again in America sunshine. Uncertain of my place in that promise, I walked through the baggage claim not with thoughts of the future or my uncle waiting outside, but overwhelmed by a more pressing need: food. In this land of plenty, who would feed me?
Hunger, you see, has a way of stripping away everything except what’s necessary.
In Haiti, I never thought of us as poor. My parents? They had this thing about the middle class. Everyone did.
What made Haiti special was its revolution, a movement that promised to erase all distinctions. Yet Haitian politics has become a comedy of errors. It’s like watching someone meticulously divide a pie while their house plunges into a sinkhole. The pie—vanishing and unreal—mirrors the societal divisions between the fictions we call la bourgeoisie, the middle class, the elite, and the masses, still fiercely defended even as what they’re standing on, along with the ashes of the revolution, disappears. It’s hard to distinguish now between what was once a battle cry for unity and what has become a mere pretext for division, illustrating that sometimes, the more things change, the more they remain absurdly the same. There’s no point explaining further. You either get it, or you don’t.
In Haiti, food was always there. But in Florida? Even the sunlight felt thinner. The air, though familiar, offered no comfort to a teenager wishing he’d never left his mother’s kitchen.
I scraped by on a meager wage, with my ulcer doubling as a therapist, a constant reminder that the body never forgets, no matter how much you want it to. I got used to my stomach dictating my mood.1
At the bus stop after my fancy dry-cleaning job, heading to evening classes, I heard the words American Dream float by but didn’t chase them. Hope had packed up long ago.
Meanwhile, the headlines buzzed with reform: Gorbachev, Thatcher, glasnost. As if decades of rot could be whitewashed overnight. I devoured it all, politics becoming my morning prayer. But those political changes sweeping across Europe offered me little warmth or refuge. The optimism in the news clashed with my reality.
South Beach? Didn’t get it. Felt like a party with my soul left at the door, and only Bob Marley could bring it back.
The Cold War? As real as mannequins posed for a fight they’d never finish.
Flash forward to the MAGA megalomaniac years, and what do we get? The threat of nuclear war, again—but this time with an American president who once played the pretender-king of reality TV, now fainting over Putin. It’s as if history took a sharp turn, with its sense of humor relegated to the back seat, trading the Cold War for a schoolyard crush, with NATO reduced to the lunchroom gossip. No treaty could have prepared us for this marriage without a pre-nuptial.
With it all, the South Florida breeze, living in the palm trees, like my brother who came with me, offered a familiar kind of reassurance. But even that breeze couldn’t blow away what has, absurdly enough, become my lifelong passion for absurdity.
The truth is, whether it was indifference or disillusionment, my transition was ordinary. I learned that no new beginning is free from the baggage we carry. It wasn’t financial insecurity or nostalgia, just lingering mistakes, forcing me to pay long after the dumb decisions were made.
I stepped into adulthood, letting fear lead the way, even if it never became a verb. The geography had changed, but life’s demands? They stayed the same.
As the evening news grew darker, dishing out stories of U.S. arms sales to Iran, the war on drugs, and incarceration, I didn’t drift. In between, the departure of Baby Doc Duvalier brought a sense of unpredictability: the first chapter in what would become forty years of Haiti on fire, a chapter no one could have imagined. Life has a cruel way of dragging you toward what you’d rather avoid—like uncertainty. And sometimes, that’s exactly where you have to focus your energy just to get through the hour.
But my story isn’t the point—yours is.
Your parents and other immigrant groups fear America’s monsters, but you and your generation face a more dangerous enemy: comfort.
Comfort numbs the senses. In a place where no one starves, it becomes its own kind of hunger, slowly devouring what once made life meaningful.
Comfort blurs the line between what you have and what you could become. You never learned to see the creeping idiocy—and that’s where the real danger lies.
Comfort is like an invisible seatbelt. The moment it tightens, you barely notice you’ve stopped moving. It gives you just enough freedom to let you forget there’s a limit.
Send me a text when you’ve dumped comfort. I won’t hold my breath.
Before we turn to that old charlatan, hope, let’s get something straight: I wasn’t starving when I got here. I had money, just no clue what to do with it in a kitchen. Instead, I spent my time wondering if dinner would appear—like it always had in Haiti. My new hobby? Agonizing over whether I’d end up fed or frustrated.
There are countless ways hope manifests, but here are five that stand out to me.
One: Resilience. Hope isn’t a verse. It’s a force so powerful that it turns oceans into highways and deserts into bridges, driving people to endure the impossible. It sustained 120,000 Japanese-Americans, most of them U.S. citizens, others with green cards, herded into internment camps during World War II, their dignity imprisoned. Yet even as they suffered under nature’s disregard, they planted gardens in the dust, and, in doing so, refused to let their souls be erased.
In the Nazi concentration camps, Viktor Frankl stared death in the face hourly, yet he gripped hope like a weapon, defying despair. Even under the looming shadow of extinction, he refused to surrender his belief that freedom could prevail—if not for his body, then for his mind. “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves,” he wrote. In Frankl’s hands, hope wasn’t a gentle comfort—it was sharper and stronger than the steel and concrete around him.
Hope also burned in the heart of 14-year-old Marie Genard and thousands of Haitians at Guantanamo Bay in the 1990s. For them, hope wasn’t waiting for rescue; it lived within them as a defiant flame. Marie knew that by holding on, in a place indifferent to her suffering, she carried the power to defy the forces that sought to erase her.
In these examples, hope is found in the darkest places, not as a guarantee, but as an act of rebellion.
Two. Aspiration. Philosopher Agnes Callard argues that this kind of hope isn’t passive or anemic—it’s aspirational. It demands restlessness and the pursuit of becoming. You transform into the kind of person who can endure decades of hard labor on Robben Island, the grief of a parent losing a child at Sandy Hook, or the desolation of broken relationships—and still (yes) run the damned marathon at 18, 50, or 70, or lead a nation out of its darkest hour.
Three. Perseverance. Throughout history, hope has been a story wrapped up in the clean narratives we tell ourselves in an absurd and messy lottery we call life. Me? I see hope as a wire you cling to, cutting into your hands, but still, you hold on. With every drop of blood spilled, comfort robs what hunger once gave: the will to survive. Like a bloodsucking friend, it drains while you’re not looking.
Four. Self-empowerment. You might not have been born into power. The world won’t hand you dignity or status, and neither will hope. But hope lets you see the chance to reach for that dignity, to build a life aligned with who you want to become. If you have the time to scroll through essays, you’re not shackled by history, nor locked in a place where names fade into numbers. You’re in a world where opportunity calls your name, daring you to take it.
Hope is the permission you give yourself to believe you can be more than the limitations of circumstance.
Five. Reinvention. Hope is certainly not a promise of certainty. It’s what gets you through life’s randomness. Progress needs hope because it dismantles what you thought you knew—whether about ulcers or human dignity. It doesn’t just change lives; it redefines them. It redefined mine. And one day, it might do the same for a young Haitian immigrant, scrolling through memes today but headed for a Nobel Prize tomorrow.
Hope, then, is about bracing for the unexpected and still daring to take the next breath.
This cunning old charlatan doesn’t waste time comforting those who suffer. It drives the bereaved, the political prisoner, the dissident, the broken-hearted… toward something greater, pulling them toward a distant horizon of freedom or dignity—even when those seem as unreachable as dead stars.
If you still think hope is your ticket out, you’ve missed the point entirely. Population growth is slowing faster than anyone predicted. Soon, there won’t be enough people to fill jobs. If you’re a teenager, you’re not competing with billions; you’re about to inherit a world where the real shortage isn’t jobs, but people with the skills and ambition to take them.
It’s easy to get pulled away by small, inconsequential things demanding your attention. Our world thrives on distractions—from the trivial to the urgent, from conspiracy theories to pixelated scandals. It’s all too easy to get lost in the endless noise of self-obsession. Does it matter if the moon landing happened or if Haiti’s 2010 earthquake was divine punishment? When the Springfield-size asteroid hits, rest assured, someone will still be arguing that Elvis is alive. Swatting at digital mosquitoes all your life is perfect poison for a comfortable soul.
Forget the cyclical fear of immigrants. Those things come and go. Today’s society is much more tolerant than when your mother needed your father’s permission to travel. But history has always been a volatile mess. We’ve been lucky lately. Now, it’s time to brace yourself for impact—we’ve entered a rough cycle. Welcome to the downside of complacency. Like oxygen, some things only seem vital when they’re gone.
The real transformation no political regime can fully control is the ongoing shift in how societies function. No Lula or Obama, no Berlusconi or Romney, no Clinton or Macron could have stopped these changes. Political volatility is here to stay—what matters is how we survive it.
Consider the printing press—a device that shattered centuries of control over knowledge. No pope or king could stop the flood of ideas that followed. The same is happening today with technology, particularly AI. No political movement could have stopped this shift, just as no monarch could halt the consequences of Gutenberg’s machine. The question isn’t about controlling it; it’s about whether we’re ready to face what’s coming. And at the risk of sounding like Bill Clinton, I have no idea what it is.
Meanwhile, speaking of control, focus on what you can. As influencers peddle their pixelated paradise, I hope you’ll soon step onto a real stage at graduation, smiling through the tears. And when you do, America will be there with both a diploma and the keys to rewrite a script inked in blood long before your last selfie hit 200 likes.
And your friends back in Haiti? They’ll be watching from their own kind of struggle, where opportunities aren’t as loud, and history feels like a cage. Envy is only natural. Wouldn’t they want to shout into the wind, to shape a future the island’s so-called leaders—the elite-bourgeoisie combo—never allowed? I bet they would.
But shouting only matters if someone listens. And that’s the problem—not just in Haiti, but almost everywhere you look. There’s no point in addressing any of this without confronting the twin dangers of hate and indifference.
Hate might burn hot, but indifference is what truly destroys. Peter Thiel, the guy who co-founded PayPal, and his allies may believe they’ve found ways to outlive the body’s malfunctions, but no one has yet found a cure for the diseases of the soul: fundamentalism, dogmatism, bigotry, and hubris—forever immune to science.
These self-anointed eugenic and Christian nationalist priests reject democracy not because of the usual economic challenges—say, unemployment or budget deficits—but because their own self-loathing demands absolute control over others. It’s not hatred that should alarm us most, but their cold indifference to the lives they deem beneath even their pets, the chilling certainty that some human beings simply don’t count. History, if you care to learn from it, shows that apathy, like a toxin, consumes nations long before we even realize we’ve been poisoned. Amen, then, to the resurrected disciples of the man from Bethlehem.
Sure, I’ve always wished for a vaccine against hate. But let’s be honest: even if we had one, there’d be a line of people (some close to me, I’m sure) refusing to take it. Self-hatred is as toxic as any poison, and humanity’s gift for willful ignorance remains undefeated.
Hate for others? That’s just self-hate with better PR. The people you hear about don’t loathe because of inflation; they hate because of what they see in the mirror.
But indifference? That’s even more dangerous. Muhammad Ali knew this, which is why he acted—not to cure hate, but because silence was a luxury he couldn’t afford. Those waiting for a miracle cure are just buying time, hoping history forgets their inaction. Indifference, standing with arms crossed during the day, becomes a thief at night, erasing accountability and allowing hate to thrive unchallenged.
And if you’re still waiting for the world to care about you, here’s the spoiler: it won’t. You’ll be standing there long after miles of walls have gone up, millions deported, clean water rationed, Manhattan and South Beach swallowed... and the stars burned out. By then, not even an echo of their god’s outrage will remain—Just the muted sigh of those who thought waiting, as if they could remain untouched by the flames while Haiti burned, unaware it was always coming for them too.
So, act!
Malala Yousafzai was fifteen when a Taliban bullet tried to shut her up. It failed. She faced death and walked away with a Nobel Peace Prize at seventeen. Hiding? Well, that doesn’t work in Ohio any more than it does in Florida.
Notes
My ulcer? Gone, thanks to Drs. Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2005 for discovering that ulcers are caused by bacteria—not stress, spicy food, or voodoo. Well, of course, I added the voodoo part.