83 Hope

John was an intelligent, honest, witty, ironic man and his response amuses me just as much now as it did eight years ago when I received it. But I did not share his alarm. Every year I had students who insisted that we were living in the end times, in the final days, that Armageddon, the Last World War, had begun, and that only the Elect would be rescued in the Rapture of the Second Coming of their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I was wary of the way John expressed so many of his formulations in the superlative and in the absolute. To John recent political events were "apocalyptic" and, like several Christians I knew, John now seemed to impute special mythic meaning to that descriptor. I did not follow that reasoning.

"I am not superstitious," I told him.

For John the terrorist attacks had reawakened Americans to what America really meant and to what its history and mythology were all about. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, he believed, were the hope of the entire world.

"I haven't had that feeling since I was a little kid," John said.

Nor had I.

"We are the guardians of that hope," John insisted, "and that hope is under attack."

Hmm.

"What works best for me is not being angry," I told him. "I read and think more clearly that way." 

"If you can keep your head while those all around you are losing theirs," John replied, "maybe as my father used to say you just do not understand the gravity of the situation."

John and I had been friends for forty years. We had met in an honors English class our freshman year at Iowa State. John had been the first person of my acquaintance publicly to espouse atheism, the first of my acquaintance to assist a woman in getting an abortion, the first to espouse Marxism, the first sympathetic to Communism, the first to oppose military service in Vietnam, the first to refuse induction, the first man of my acquaintance to grow long hair, the first to smoke marijuana, the first to ingest lsd, the first to study computer programming, the first to move to San Francisco to be a hippy, the first to study Eastern religion and to explore the occult, the first to practice Buddhism, the first to invite needy friends and associates into his home, some for as long as several months, until they could get re-established on their own, the first to quit his job solely on the grounds of religious principle, the first of my acquaintance to join a commune; and now John was the first person of my acquaintance ever to leave a commune, to renounce forty years of commitment and service to liberal principles and ideals, and to become a conservative Republican patriot. To say that his transformation confused me is an understatement and my confusion was painful.

I loved the man.

It was John who had brought me the dharma, introduced me to the Way, and made possible the greatest event of my life, the intellectual and psychomystical experience that had wrecked my marriage, punished my children, aborted my third and terminal college degree, ruined my reputation, ultimately cost me my job, and made me the village pariah for four years.

For many years there had been very few things—if any at all—as important to me as my friendship with John. Now in my emails I tried everything I knew how in order to save it.

I could not.