We now know from the Trump-Woodward tapes that the President of the United States had known for a long time that the Coronavirus was very deadly and that our nation was in big trouble. He did nothing to change the course of the impending woes. Like he does with everything else, he chose to lie about it constantly. By the time we found out about the revelation that he made to the iconic Bob Woodward on February 7, 2020, 6 million people had already been infected across the United States and over 190,000 people had already died. There is perhaps no other place where the Coronavirus has exposed leaders and challenged us to redefine the concept of leadership as it has in the Western world, especially the United States. While the leader of our country has acted with hitherto unimaginable degree of incompetence, incredible dishonesty and immeasurable levels of irresponsibility, his fans have followed him with unwavering and unrepentant zeal matched only by his unequivocal callousness.
Thanks to historic guarantees of freedom of information in the United States, it has been possible to hear tapes and read factual news stories despite increasing spates of verbal assaults and threats on the people who bring us the news. Then there is the other situation of the ever-increasing and worsening motivations that some in our society constantly have to bend the news toward falsehood and ramp up disinformation even in broad daylight. So, I ask myself: If this is happening in the United States, how can we know what the leaders of government in other countries have not done to protect their citizens? How do we know what conversations they have had behind closed doors that did not represent an interest in saving the lives of people? How do we know that most of those leaders are not just as irresponsible as the one who lies relentlessly and does so without shame?
As I write, I know that more people are dying otherwise preventable deaths for reasons that include the failure of honest leadership in countries like mine that were considered during pre-Covid times as the world’s leaders in knowledge, competent and humane leadership. Knowing that to be true, how can I be zestful in my assessment of our world when tomorrow may indeed not be better than today? How can this not be a legitimate concern when we live in a world replete with people who continue to choose leaders against their own self interests and then become complicit in their own oppression?
We have often thought of leaders as people who rise to positions of power over us and therefore have earned the authority to make decisions that impact us in ways, big and small. By considering leadership in that way, we have often wondered less about how people got to the positions that they occupy and more about the power and authority that the role confers on them. Therefore, we have ascribed authority to positions and people, and we have followed and revered them just because we are conditioned to do so. To my mind, the time has come for us to re-examine how we choose who we call leaders. Leaders should make others better, not worse. Leaders should solve problems, not create new and bigger ones. They should serve the people that they lead, not use them as props. Leaders should understand that they are themselves human just as the fallible people who can be forgiven for the misjudgments that produce leaders with no destinations in mind to lead their citizens, subjects or subordinates to. We make mistakes because we are human. People who cannot acknowledge their own mistakes and/or cannot get themselves to ask for forgiveness are not just arrogant and blind to self, but must never touch the reins of leadership because they can only harm the institutions and people that they lead. That is because a bad leader is a scourge to the the institutions and/or people that he/she leads. There is no way around that.
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