“The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with the power to endanger the public liberty.”
-John Adams
All together now: Oops.
There is something on my mind today that goes well beyond business. Today, I use the term “leadership” in its fullest sense, as a proxy for an impossibly idealistic alchemy of integrity, courage, trust, determination, sacrifice, service, passion, intelligence, foresight, astuteness, self-control, decisiveness, judgment, vision, excellence, poise, presence, inspiration, benevolence, justice, and humor.
***
The events of the world today have tested our ability to lead—with everything that represents—and we have, so far, failed to rise to the occasion. Not the business “we,” the Boomers “we”, Gen X “we” or Millennials “we;” this failing has been happening on a grand, national level. I take little comfort in the fact that this is something we did together, as one.
As Americans, our sense of leadership—and everything that represents—seems to have been significantly damaged by 7 fat years of indulgence followed by 7 years made lean by fear. I don’t believe such damage to be permanent. I see too much latent good… as well as good that’ starting to manifest after an interminably long dormancy.
We lost our roots there for awhile, growing guilty where we should have been proud, tormented where we should have been clear, lazy where we should have been passionate. Our collective memories of freedom, liberty, and justice had grown so dull that they were perverted without our noticing; our notions of critical thought, independence, and self-sacrifice rusted.
But something stirs amongst us… an awareness that we are not a nation of fence builders, or shirkers of global responsibility, of fear-mongerers. We are not bullies.
We have lived through a dark time, a time when we committed the one unforgivable sin in a democratic nation: we abdicated the responsibility of holding our representative institutions accountable to the representatives themselves. We gave away the power to jeapordize our liberties to people who used that power for their own gain.
Worse, our laziness pervaded every area of our lives: government, business, religion… we can cry that our trust was broken, but really, we turned a blind eye to people whose jobs were simply to represent us.
One could say they represented us a bit too well.
There is good news. The tide is turning, the lesson is not over. In fact, the lesson does not end until we master it… and yes, that is the good news. We get to keep at it until we emerge triumphant.
America is not a kingdom; we are under no obligation to “wait out” a bad reign. In a democracy, we are always moving toward a future of our own choosing… and just in case, we have a system of checks and balances, along with a free press that, when we think to use them, provide assurance that any mistakes we make are indeed our own and not those of a privileged few.
Do not expect our public representatives to show us the way. They are not leaders in that sense; they are merely a reflection of the people they serve. No matter what they promise, all our politicians can ever be are representatives; mirrors cannot cast their own images. If you long for leaders of character, then you yourself must give them something of character to reflect. You yourself must conduct yourself with character. Only then, when your representative stands before you, will you see what you most want to see.
Leadership starts small. It starts with critical thought, independence, and self-sacrifice. It continues with integrity, courage, and a host of other attributes. Leadership, in a simple way, is living a life that cannot be bought!
America, land of the free, home of the brave. It’s our home, and we don’t need anyone’s permission to take it back. Our malaise of these past seven years is a function of us failing to exercise our ability to think for ourselves. Without independent thought, terrorism, war, or poor leadership, the economy, commodity prices… that is when these things become debiliating problems.
It looks like we’ve had enough of the problems.
The question is, how soon will we have the solutions?
Jason Seiden is Co-founder and CEO of Ajax Social Media, a training company that shows professionals how use social media to work more effectively.
I'm the CEO of Ajax Social Media. We're helping 1 million people shine by making their online stories better. 
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Nice post, you got some good points there – thank you.
Don’t you call standing up to just about the entire continent of Europe and ridding the world of an evil dictator leadership?
Such certainty could just as easily be attributed to liars, sociopaths, and the delusional as to leaders. That act is not enough to demonstrate leadership.
At the time, my position was that there was a case to invade, and that was based on the need to put teeth to a decade’s worth of UN resolutions. I agreed that the UN was weak, and that Saddam was a bad dude. But that’s not the case the government made. We were played for fools, and I don’t need to reward the man who played us just because he went to the mat and never wavered in his claims, even in the face of international pressure. Refusing to stand down is not leadership when you are *wrong.*
And what of the other acts of our fearless leader? Is there anything else we can point to as evidence of his character one way or another? Can we maybe lay some stuff on the table and look for a trend? Let’s see…
Six years after the fact, after the original argument of WMDs has been cast into doubt because of its source; after Rove and Cheney were discovered to have not only “massaged” intelligence information, but also to have discredited those who dared called them on it (Valerie Plame, anyone?); after the blatant cronyism shown to Rumself (Abu Gharib), Michael Brown (Katrina), Chertoff (Katrina continues to be a mess, and he’s never been held accountable), Rove (the Plame investigation), and Gonzalez (US District Attorney scandal); after putting up a patsy for Supreme Court Justice (Harriett Myers); after chasing scientists out of NGO organizations and staffing them instead with politicians (NIH); after using Executive Orders to effectively nullify the law of the land while being able to claim he wouldn’t use his veto power (at least for his first term); after stealing the 2000 Rep nomination from McCain (S. Carolina); after chasing out the best people from his team early (Powell) and holding on cowards (McClellan); after nearly bankrupting school districts with unfunded mandates (No Child Left Behind); after antagonizing an enemy by backing him into a corner (Iran, who faces American troops on both its eastern and western borders); after setting up secret prisons (CIA planes; naval prison ships; Guantanamo); after warrantlessly tapping American’s phone conversations (FISA court circumvention); after restricting press access to the WH for printing unflattering articles; after failing to prepare to win in Iraq (where to begin?)… and the list goes on… after all this, I’d say, yes, there is a clear trend… and it’s not a good one.
In light of all this, I wouldn’t call standing up to Europe an act of leadership. I’d call it the first act of a power-hungry and under-qualified politician who should have been Commissioner of Baseball instead of ruler of the free world.