I am guilty of being too hopeful. When my car was keyed, I genuinely thought that someone had accidentally scratched it as they walked by. When an old man accused my sister of cutting him in line and then told her that she couldn’t cut him because she wasn’t in India anymore, I hoped that he was just having a bad day.

Hope is a fantastic thing. To be hopeful means to believe in a better tomorrow. It means that you do not let the evils of the world blind you from seeing the good all around you. It means that you wake up each morning prepared to look past the dark clouds and see the sunshine. It means that you move forward past each and every hardship (even if it takes a while) because you know that the best is yet to come.

This hope has guided millions through difficult times. Anne Frank, while she was in hiding from the Nazis, wrote in her diary: “I don’t think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains.” Mahatma Gandhi, as he fought to free India of British rule, said that we “must not lose faith in humanity.”

I haven’t lost faith in humanity, and I never will. But no one “accidentally” leaves two deep, jagged lines spanning the entire width of your car. And regardless of all the hardships you went through today, you do not have an excuse to make a racist comment towards anyone.

So we can’t give into blind hope. Just because I hope that I get into law school doesn’t mean that I actually will. Just because I believe that government leaders have only their constituents’ best interests at heart doesn’t mean that they actually do. Just because I pray that the Las Vegas massacre was nothing more than an anomaly doesn’t mean we won’t see something like this again.

And this is where cynicism comes in. We must ask questions. We can’t sit back and rely on the government to solve problems. We can’t depend on our prayers to be answered by some higher power. We have to be a little wary because it is this caution that will inspire us to be active citizens. We must ask ourselves, “What can I do to make sure that my hopes become a reality? What do I pray for every night, and what can I do to make it happen?”

We must be the framers of our own destiny. So let’s constantly have hope in our heart, knowing that it is up to us, and only us, to turn that hope into a reality.