On Dec. 5, 1955, 90% of Black people in Montgomery, Alabama, decided not to take the bus.
They did it because they believed things could change. They kept that hope for 13 months. In the end, the city of Montgomery desegregated its buses.
It’s hard to imagine something like that happening today. It seems to me there is a great sense of pessimism – a lack of hope – that permeates modern politics.
A 2023 Wall Street Journal poll found almost 80% of people are not confident life for their children’s generation will be better than theirs. This pessimism is even greater among young people. According to a 2025 Harvard Youth Poll, just 15% of Americans between 18 and 29 think the country is heading in the right direction.
But pessimism about the future of the country is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Pessimism is strongly correlated with apathy. If people – especially young people – are apathetic, we won’t advocate or fight for the change we want.
UCLA students have to believe that things can change and be willing to fight for that change. This means having an optimistic vision of the future and working to support leaders who make us believe we can achieve it.
Unfortunately, many UCLA students are pessimistic.
“We are in a regressive state in virtually every – by every metric,” said Julie Ershadi, an Iranian affairs graduate student in the Near Eastern Languages and Cultures department.
We are living during a time that invites this pessimism. My grandmother, an American citizen, takes her passport with her everywhere she goes – just in case she gets pulled over by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents for not looking like an American citizen.
[Related: Student groups host walkout at UCLA to protest ICE, support migrant workers]
Times like these don’t inspire hope.
“A majority are probably accepting it because it’s just easier on the head,” said Davis Frolich, a fourth-year financial actuarial mathematics student. “A lot of people are just concerned with their own lives.”
And that is understandable. There are many things in the world I want to see changed. But all too often I don’t take action – because what impact could I, as one college student, possibly have?
“A lot of people your age, you’re like, ‘Why? Why would I be hopeful? What is there to be hopeful about? Everything is bad,” said Paul Taylor, a Presidential professor of philosophy. “But this is precisely when hope is important, right? It is important to cultivate the capacity to look at the world as it stands and identify spaces of possibility.”
We have to be hopeful – optimistic that things can change – or we will not be able to make change happen when the opportunity arises.
[Related: Campus Queries: What is the basis of hope, and why is it so important to hold onto?]
But plain optimism is too simplistic. You can’t simply force yourself to be positive. I’ve tried. I watched Superman four times in theaters and pledged to take a more hopeful view of the world. Just eight months later, I am back to my glass being half empty.
A true, earnest, lasting sense of hope cannot exist in a vacuum. We have to find inspiration somewhere, in something or someone.
“One of the things successful candidates and political figures can do is offer an alternative vision of what America has been and can be,” Taylor said. “It can be a forward-looking project. It’s the American experiment, after all.”
These leaders are few and far between – but they do exist.
Martin Luther King Jr. offered a vision – a dream – for America’s future that acknowledged its terrible history while still asking people to believe things could get better. King helped inspire the people of Montgomery, Alabama, to believe that things would actually change if they committed themselves to the discipline of hope.
Zohran Mamdani offered a vision for New York City’s future that acknowledged the city was unaffordable while asking people to believe it did not have to be that way. He convinced voters they deserved better than Andrew Cuomo.
We are in the swing of the 2026 midterm elections. Soon after, candidates will race for the White House – the first presidential election in a decade that hopefully will not include Trump.
Now, we must reflect on the kind of leaders we want.
In this election cycle, and every one after it, there are many things to consider when casting your vote. Do I like the way this candidate speaks? Do I like their policies? Do they have a good chance of winning? All of these, and several other criteria, are legitimate ways to grade a candidate.
But I have one more.
Does this candidate offer a vision of America that makes me optimistic for the future? We need leaders who inspire us to hope for better, to believe we can be better and to actually do better.
If we want change, we have to elect leaders who won’t just fight for it, but inspire us to fight for it, too.
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