One of the many, many things popular culture gets wrong about Pandora is that she didn’t open a BOX, it was a jar, a pithos that the Greek used to store all sorts of things. In the myth, Pandora opens the jar, and unspecified evils fly out into the world. Hastily, she then closes it back — trapping one last evil, hope, inside. The arguments about what that could possibly mean began immediately thereafter.
One interpretation of the tale is that hope is… deceptive. When viewed through my rather jaded lens this week of anything changing in reference to gun violence in our country… I can see that.
