Hope amidst
suffering, hope when men know only defeat and despair, hope when death seems to smother out the shoots of life springing from the hearts of men, hope for our society, our world, our city, our schools, courts, prisons, legislatures, hope for our children, for our elderly, hope for all the millions of men and women
over the face of this
globe who simply want to live out their lives as free human beings not trampled down and stepped on by the overlords of this world.
As Adorno famously cautioned that poetry after Auschwitz is obscene, artists
suffered a severe existential crisis in the wake of the Holocaust, the Bomb, the Gulag, the Cultural Revolution and the myriad anti-colonial wars of liberation breaking out all
over the
globe.