Honorable Mention - Corrine Ardoin, Age 47

Welcome to our Optimistic Essay category. Here you will find the $1,000 winning contest essay, 5 finalist essays and 15 honorable mention essays and a growing list of hand-picked select essays that readers submitted during our "Why Are You Optimistic About the Future?" contest. This is a special category dedicated to those who took the time to share their touching stories and bright perspectives with HappyNews.com.

Several years ago, Stephen Spielberg restored my faith in humanity with his film, "Schindler's List." I had become very negative regarding my fellow man and turned to cynicism and sarcasm to cope. Like Mark Twain had long ago become, the malcontented writer, his view of humankind grown dark and ill, I, too, slipped over the years out of disillusionment into disgust.

I had read a movie review of "Schindler's List" when it first came to the screen and, in the review, it said it was an important film parents should take their children to see. I took my teenage son and his friend and was immediately struck with the stark contrast of the black-and-white film and a child's red dress. She was trying to hide from the Nazi soldiers as Oskar Schindler, a Nazi himself, looked on in helplessness and grief. Her lifeless body was later added to the heap of corpses thrown into a mass grave, her red dress the only color on the screen. Though Oskar Schindler did not believe he had a role to play in helping the Jews, because of his position in business and in the Nazi party, he was able to save over a thousand people. I felt horror at the scenes of violence. I felt sadness that people could do such horrible things. I even felt ashamed of my German heritage. By the end of the movie, however, I felt hope. Those 1,100 Jews that Oskar Schindler saved during the Holocaust, married and had children, their children married and had children, until many thousands of descendants now live in Europe and in the United States. One man had made a difference.

It is complex, but to grasp how I came to not just pull myself out of the despair I had previously sunk into, but to rise far above it, I must at least strive to understand what happened while I watched the movie. "Schindler's List" is nothing less than a masterpiece. I knew that as I watched the film, the audience not merely being manipulated into their emotions by carefully selected songs, but out of the director's own passion about the story he was telling, his creative expression, the message of hope thus put forth making a connection with my heart. I felt hope in the end and felt my faith in humanity restored, simply because a passionate film, created from the heart, touched my own where such human qualities as love, hope, and faith reside.

Whenever my faith, my optimism about people and our future begin to waver, I remember what the heart can do. The heart can see all that is good in a person and in the world. The heart can see that, though we may falter, though we may have faults and shortcomings, we are always striving for better, to be loved, to be accepted, to be free. I am optimistic about the future, because I know in my heart that even though we all may differ in opinion, in political standing, we are essentially the same. We are all human. We all need one another to love, to connect, to find meaning to our existence. Even though I may not see in my lifetime all that I hope to see, I know that because of what I value and share with others, this seed of hope is planted everywhere I go. I am optimistic about the future, because all the seeds I and so many others have planted in our lifetimes, seeds of compassion, of love, of faith, of kindness, of hope are all growing and thriving. I know this, because I feel it in my heart.