The Ten Stages of Losing Hope:
Stage One – You have hope, but wow. Things are bad.
Stage Two – You have hope, but sometimes you’re not sure why.
Stage Three – You refuse to give up hope. Despair is a luxury.
Stage Four – Your heart clings to hope even though your head tells your heart that it’s a fool, and with increasing frequency.
Stage Five – You believe that you have lost all hope, and then something terrible happens, and you lose a little bit more, which means you must have had some hope left to lose.
Stages Six, Seven, and Eight – Repeat Stage Five, each time with a smaller sliver of previously unsuspected residual hope.
Stage Nine – You genuinely have no hope left, but you continue to behave as though you do, because you believe that the performance of hope has value.
Stage Ten – You give up.
As regards Israel/Palestine, I reached Stage Ten in February. For that and other reasons, I’m going back to school next week to get a second Masters Degree, this one in Library and Information Science.
Emily L. Hauser - In My Head 