Both former President Bill Clinton and current Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee are from Hope, Ark. One of Clinton's campaign themes when he was running for president was "I still believe in a place called Hope." I'm not sure I do anymore.

Hope means possibility. Without possibility there can be no hope. As we go through election cycle after election cycle we hear the message of hope and change over and over and over and yet, after the election is over, most things don't change at all. At least not for the better.

We often find the same conundrum in our personal lives. We listen to the promises made to us and hope lives in our heart and our soul because of the possibility of those promises coming true. But so often they don't. People lie to us or they change their mind or they didn't mean what they said to begin with and, in the process of experiencing that, hope is lost because the possibility ends.

If we look back at the history of man, it's clearly evident that we've always been much more committed to war than love. Sylvester Stallone of Rambo and Rocky fame said in last week's edition of Time magazine that "War is natural. Peace is an accident. We're animals….Nothing changes. The world will never come together and say we are one."

I believe he's right. I haven't always believed that. In fact, it's a pretty recent transition for me. The late Hunter S. Thompson loved the late '60s and early '70s more than any other period of time because he said the world then was full of "possibilities instead of limitations."

The more pain we suffer, the more rejection we experience, the more losses we endure dulls and eventually eliminates our hope for the possibilities that the world we live in and our own world within the larger world will somehow end up right; somehow end up correct; somehow end up with joy and contentment and starry-eyed wonder.

Because all too often we experience despair and defeat instead. We have our hearts ripped out of our chests and when that happens, our hope is ripped out as well. We go from being optimists to pessimists. We begin to see the glass half-empty instead of half-full, we have a hard time focusing or even acknowledging the good things happening in our lives because the one bad thing often overwhelms the many good things.

So whether it's a war that's lost, an election that's lost, a job that's lost or a love that's lost, it gets harder and harder to bounce back. Instead of anticipating future conquests, we become so immersed in our loss that we finally get to a point we can't recover from.

When we know in our heart of hearts how good our lives and the lives of others would have been had people just made the right decisions, it's often difficult and sometimes impossible to bounce off the canvas and try again. When we know the world would have been as perfect as possible had our dreams come true, it becomes perfectly impossible when they don't.

Some will continue to believe in a place called Hope in spite of all the defeats they suffer but many will not. Sometimes a boxer gets knocked down so often he simply can't get back up again.

That happens to the rest of us sometimes too.