Tom Hanks on fear and faith

I wish I’d had Tom Hanks as class day speaker the year we graduated! But even so, his address is worth listening to. I’m not entirely sure I would define faith the way he does, but I think his reflections are powerful and important. Here’s the video, and then a few selected quotes I managed to transcribe.

Some excerpts:

Fear is a powerful physiological force of 2011…

Fear has become the commodity that sells as certainly as sex. Fear is cheap, fear is easy, fear gets attention, fear is spread as fast as gossip and is just as glamorous, juicy and profitable. Fear twists facts into fictions that become indistinguishable from ignorance. Fear is a profit churning "go to" with a home market being your whole family.

"If fear is cultivated it will become stronger, if faith is cultivated it will achieve mastery." (direct quote from John Paul Jones)

Fear is whispered in our ears and shouted in our faces, faith must be fostered by the man or woman you see every day in the mirror… The former forever snaps at our heels and our synapses and delays our course, the latter can spur our bootheels to bewander it, stimulate our creativity and drive us forward.

Fear or faith, which will be our master?

Fear will get the the worst of the best of us, and peddlars of influence count on that.

[The] American cause at its best has been the cultivation of a faith that declares we will all live in peace when we are all free to worship as we choose, when we are free to express our hearts, and when we all seek a place free from fear.

But we live in a world where too many of us are too ready to believe in things that do not exist, conspiracies abound, divisions are constructed, and the differences between us are not celebrated for making us stronger, but calculated and programmed to set us against each other. Our faith is tested by unpredictable providence, and threatened when common sense is corrupted by specific interests.

Evidence that our nation is becoming a better place is everywhere, but each new day fear is, as the Jersey poet said, lurking in the darkness of the edge of town.

Your rising from bed every morning will give fear its chance to grow stronger, just as it will afford faith its chance to blossom. You will make the choice to react to one, or create the other.