As a leader of people, one should always recognize, and even embrace, the reality that your authority has limits. I can inform people, I can encourage people, in certain circumstances I can even correct people, but the minute, nay the second, that I start to employ those things for my own benefit at the expense of the community, I have failed as a leader, and I should no longer be trusted. I know that sounds harsh; it is, and thankfully there is a certain amount of grace that operates in the situation, so that consequences are not as immediate as the failure. That's another thing, failure is part of leadership, anyone who tells you it's not is delusional and not to be trusted. A good leader will admit their failure, learn from their failure and seek to do better. A bad leader will double down on their failure in a vain attempt to look strong when they are weak.
I think you probably see where I'm going with this, but let me tell you that this is a log I have had to take out of my own eye many, many times, so I know what I'm talking about. If I were to try and lead the 200 people in my congregation the way our President is leading this country, I would deserve to be kicked out. Of all the tests of a good leader that the Donald fails, the one that he fails most drastically is the ability to admit when he's wrong. As even people from his own tribe are saying (John McCain, Orin Hatch and Laura Bush to name a few prominent ones), he could stop this travesty at the southern border right now. He doesn't have to change the law, he just needs to admit that the policy of "zero tolerance" was misguided and had unintended consequences. We could argue about whether the consequences were really unintended, but if the sinister figure of Stephen Miller becomes the face of our immigration policy we may be deeper in Hell than I feared. So let's just give Donald the benefit of the doubt, let's use the most reliable personality observations that we have about him: he is vain, which leads him to project an strong image, and fear the appearance of weakness; he is an intuitive decision maker, who admittedly "goes with his gut" on a lot of matters. His "gut" tells him that our borders are porous and that MS-13 is flooding our country with brutal thugs. Both of these feelings have some grounding in reality, but objective analysis tells us that neither problem is as bad as Trump and his cronies make it sound. But he has persistently banished most of the advisers who had any stomach to present him with contrary information, and kept sycophants and trolls who affirm his most pessimistic notions.
The term "Zero Tolerance" sounds tough. My kid's school has a zero tolerance policy about bullying. A lot of places have a zero tolerance policy about illegal drug use. It's a thing that tells the bad guys that there's a new sheriff in town. And almost every zero tolerance policy is prone to produce miscarriages of justice, punishments that do not fit the crime and situations where innocent people get caught in an inflexible bureaucratic enforcement of a rule.
If Trump were a different kind of person, he would recognize that his tough guy routine with regard to immigration has gone too far. That picture of the little girl crying up at her mother being searched by border patrol, the pictures of the "chain link walls," the recording of the wailing children, and the general outrage from all quarters, would tell a good leader that a course correction needs to be made. That would require the virtue of humility, which is the single virtue that Trump most glaringly lacks.
A year ago, I might have had some hope that there were wise people talking the Donald down from his draconian tower of witless arrogance, but I think he has banished the few wise men he had from his company. I am not sanguine about the hope that our legislative branch, or even the judicial branch will ride to the rescue. I think they have been caught flat footed by a leader who seems to lack the ability to self-reflect and course correct, and in some cases they are just plain scared because they honestly have let him get too much power in the first place.
We are in a bad spot, and we have no one to blame but ourselves. The responsible, grown up thing to do is to insist that we not let the consequences of our fearful tribalism, our selfish isolationism and our feckless polity fall on innocent children. In the long run we must learn not to trust people like Donald Trump, they will insistently be who they are. We can no longer assume that the institutions will change them or even restrain them, unless we recover and restore those institutions. That will require that we have the humility to admit how we participated in breaking them (swallowing false narratives, engaging in wishful thinking, and flat out apathy). It will require that we have the patience and wisdom to participate in their reconstruction even though the work will be slow and mostly dull. It will mean demanding that your news sources are reliable and not simply feeding you what you want to hear. It will mean actually paying attention to local politics and even participating in the system, at the very least as an informed voter. It means that we have to stop getting distracted by shiny objects and empty promises. It means that we will have to learn to reject rhetoric and arguments that do not adhere to logic and principal, even if we like them. It means that we will have to search for and work to reattain our moral structure and balance. We need to figure out what holds us together as a country, and it can't be money, and it can't be power, they are idols and they will lead us into Hell where we sacrifice our children on the flaming altars of their demands. I know that sounds dramatic, but C.S. Lewis was right when he observed that idolatry always seems to lead to that particular omega point: screaming children, grieving parents and a people who are near to utter dissolution.
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