Leadership

LEADERSHIP

Leadership involves bringing out the best in people and helping them understand the benefits of working together as a team. It also involves creating an environment that encourages the open exchange of ideas. It's hard to find much evidence of true political leadership from many of our candidates these days.  Instead, too many of them spend their energy attacking one another and mocking those with opposing opinions.  The press doesn't get high grade either when 90% of the coverage involves reporting all of the grisly details of who attacked who.  We can do better than this and maybe the first step in that process is for each of us to take a moment to reflect on how lucky we all are to be living in this wonderful country with this exceptional democracy. For all of our complaining, and all of the things we see going wrong, who among us would rather live in another country? The vast majority of us are here because of a random piece of hereditary good luck. Our parents were American citizens.  But being a naturally born citizen is not necessarily the same as being a true American. It's not that easy. Being a true American is hard work. In our brief history as a nation and a fledgling democracy we've had to work and fight to overcome slavery and racial prejudice. We've had to  work and fight to give women the right to vote, to allow inter-racial marriage, to provide equal education and opportunity to people of all colors, to make sure that workers are paid fairly and not abused, to prevent the cancer of greed from infecting our free enterprise system, and to live up to the words "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all people are created equal". It hasn't always been easy and it's often been messy but we've made progress. We're a better nation now than we were then, and we'll continue to become an even better nation if we all take personal responsibility to keep the promises of our founding fathers.  Personal responsibility and leadership require getting involved in the elective process and choosing leaders for their wisdom and compassion, for their ability to bring us together in common cause, and  for their ability to bring out the best in us .Put another way, we must continually be on guard against those who would divide us, those who promote anger and prejudice, those who attack our government, and those pit us against one another.