A Breath of Fresh Air: Re-Thinking Leadership
People tragedy a sense of some decency has emerged with a new constitution.
Sadly those infected by the virus of racism and religious fundamentalism are still in parliaments: one former Don and a British prime minister had described such people as ‘parliamentary lepers’.
Need for justice and equality
Black Lives Matter is simply to give some balance of justice and equality in a world of so much injustice in so many forms, faces and formats.
Think of South Africa: how easily an apartheid constitution was imposed on a nation by guns and goons, assisted from some universities, both here and there, while holding a Black Bible.
In all this enveloping tragedy what we miss today is the leadership of an Abe Lincoln, or a Martin Luther King,Jr. King, radically influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s tried and trusted techniques of fighting for justice and human rights, was shot dead by a White supremacist in 1968: twenty years after the mahatma himself was murdered by a rabid religious extremist.
The virus of religion and race had taken the lives of two of the noblest souls.
When Gandhi turned his critical torch on the ugliness of untouchability, he was killed in cold blood by a high-caste fanatic.
The consequences of both those killings we can witness today in two of the world’s wobbling democracies, by leaders full of promises.
Leadership issue
We may not have as yet found a vaccine to combat COVID-19, but more worrying is the fact that there’s no world leader on the horizon to beckon us to join in the fight for human survival: New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden is from a small country; Chancellor Angela Merkel has a terrible national ethos in racial matters.
Great Britain has shrunk into Little England. Winston Churchill’s statues are being desecrated for he’s now seen as the arch racial imperialist instead of the intrepid voice against the Nazis because he saw the world as Black and White, even as soldiers of many colours fought to save England and Europe in their darkest hours.
But life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is always and everywhere indivisible and common to all humanity.
Most of the current clutch of mediocre leaders – the exaltation of the average – seem more concerned with votes and mining than lives and freedom, yours and mine.
The poverty of the poor may never end – Abe Lincoln said God so loved the poor, he made so many of them. Or as Jesus said the poor will always be with you. The vulgarity of the rich is endless.
The point is not only a healing vaccine is missing, but a leader, a light, in this nightmare.
One thought Barack Obama ,who made history by becoming the first Black President of the US, could rise to the occasion by truly becoming the world leader without the power of a president, but the prestige and mana of a great soul.
Instead his platitudinous statements may or may not help Jo Biden’s election chances in November, but it’s not doing much good towards changing the society of which he was the elected president for two terms.
He had captured the imagination of the world for a change we could have believed in.
It’s time for him to throw away the mantle of presidential pomp, and descend like Moses from the American wilderness with a few life-changing ideas, and society – shaping structures. Yes, he can. And take Mr Donald Trump by his tweets to do something that makes America Great again; Never to Hate Again!
Miracles are always possible in a single, solitary soul in any wilderness.