So here we are – another ordinary day in what we convince ourselves is our ordinary life. A peep at today's paper, maybe a news bulletin or two on the radio, and back we go to our so-called ordinary life.
Why so-called? Because everything about it is all but ordinary. The public servants we elected to office are everything but normal, and they cannot be blamed for all their misgivings. Someone placed a note at the ballot for them to be where they are, and that someone is us. Those who chose to turn their back on their democratic right to vote are responsible also. They chose to tuck their ostrich heads even deeper into the sand.
But that's okay: Life goes on, work is waiting to be done, children to be picked up from kindergarten and school, meals cooked, houses cleaned. Yet this abnormality looms like the stripe of pollution that settles on the horizon on days of heavy heat: sallow, sickly, interminable.
It is the only way conceivable to continue living without giving in to perpetual anxiety. And it is this same sedative we dose on ourselves that is the stumbling block to our burning desire to make a change, to have our leaders come just a tad closer to ordinariness.
It seems as though it was easier to be active and make a change when we didn't have it so good. When it wasn’t granted that people would have a telephone line in their home (until the early 1980s), or go on holiday abroad (until the mid-1990s). It seems that as long as ideology was not a worn out concept, when leaders had a modicum of genuine care for their constituency, for their people, the concept of true leadership was also intact.
And by true leadership I mean a person who not only can ensure he gets elected. I mean someone who can follow on his declared intents, word for word; someone who has an agenda and sticks by it come rain or come shine; that one person, who when everyone else is looking for broad shoulders to stand behind, offers his/her own and pulls through. While ideology's heyday is long-gone (and it seems that leadership came by the bucket load back then), the need for leadership has not in the least waned. If anything, it increased.
The reason why leadership is such a vital commodity is that we need that one person to prove to us our life is not an illusion. That online investment, hi-tech startups, the stock markets, car leasing companies, mortgaged houses, TV-based entertainment, are not a hoax. That someone whose sense of reality is more intact than ours won't pull the plug on the supercomputer that generates the virtual space of our existence.
Tough call, I know. But who is to pick up the gauntlet?
Why so-called? Because everything about it is all but ordinary. The public servants we elected to office are everything but normal, and they cannot be blamed for all their misgivings. Someone placed a note at the ballot for them to be where they are, and that someone is us. Those who chose to turn their back on their democratic right to vote are responsible also. They chose to tuck their ostrich heads even deeper into the sand.
But that's okay: Life goes on, work is waiting to be done, children to be picked up from kindergarten and school, meals cooked, houses cleaned. Yet this abnormality looms like the stripe of pollution that settles on the horizon on days of heavy heat: sallow, sickly, interminable.
It is the only way conceivable to continue living without giving in to perpetual anxiety. And it is this same sedative we dose on ourselves that is the stumbling block to our burning desire to make a change, to have our leaders come just a tad closer to ordinariness.
It seems as though it was easier to be active and make a change when we didn't have it so good. When it wasn’t granted that people would have a telephone line in their home (until the early 1980s), or go on holiday abroad (until the mid-1990s). It seems that as long as ideology was not a worn out concept, when leaders had a modicum of genuine care for their constituency, for their people, the concept of true leadership was also intact.
And by true leadership I mean a person who not only can ensure he gets elected. I mean someone who can follow on his declared intents, word for word; someone who has an agenda and sticks by it come rain or come shine; that one person, who when everyone else is looking for broad shoulders to stand behind, offers his/her own and pulls through. While ideology's heyday is long-gone (and it seems that leadership came by the bucket load back then), the need for leadership has not in the least waned. If anything, it increased.
The reason why leadership is such a vital commodity is that we need that one person to prove to us our life is not an illusion. That online investment, hi-tech startups, the stock markets, car leasing companies, mortgaged houses, TV-based entertainment, are not a hoax. That someone whose sense of reality is more intact than ours won't pull the plug on the supercomputer that generates the virtual space of our existence.
Tough call, I know. But who is to pick up the gauntlet?
posted by Orr at 1:59 pm
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