COME OUT COME OUT, WHEREVER YOU ARE

This post, penned last summer, was retrieved from drafts, today:

When considering need to switch tracks away from ineffectual (self-serving) leadership, intuitive thought suggests that nations throughout the world have been rudderless for so long as to call upon the universal spirit to sprinkle mankind with a rebalanced sense of objectivity in time to make haste, because we, who populate our planet, have not one precious moment left to lose, and though patience is a virtue, I respectfully challenge people the world over to empower your voices to choir up with mine as together we implore effective leadership to come out, come out, wherever you are, because the human condition has need to rally round a voice, empowered with astute intelligence that far outweighs the ego residing in The White House, which proves so braggadocios as to be more consumed with tweeting than leading the populous toward a safer tomorrow ... Ohhmmm

Being drawn toward anything relating to that which influenced the thought processes of my favorite authors, I recently read  MOCKINGBIRD SONGS by Flynt Wayne, whose narrative describes Harper Lee's family upon whom the characters in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD were patterned, and I quote:  “Decades earlier, during the civil rights movement, the mayor of Eufaula had asked Louise (Harper Lee’s sister) to serve on a ... committee ... called Community on the Move. This five-person group had been started by a black woman Louise knew who was concerned about education, racial divisions, and drug trafficking in their town. Louise, asking the committee founder what she could contribute to the effort, was told simply, 'You have a white face.' Some local folks would have been offended by such tokenism. Louise agreed to serve. She and the other committee members met twice weekly, ate together, discussed community problems, and tried to make the town better. Her black friend began stopping by for coffee, a small act of personal friendship in most places but a racial blurring of the color line in civil rights–era Eufaula.”

In another passage, Wayne goes on to say:  “Citing her father as inspiration, Louise explained to us that he had been ... a man of honor and personal decency, attuned to his duty as a community leader, one who treated all people fairly and with respect, though he was not liberal, self-righteous, or ostentatiously religious.  His Methodist upbringing had persuaded him ‘that the Kingdom of God was as much concerned with justice in Alabama as with heaven in the hereafter.’ Although he did not endorse the civil rights movement as early as Alice (another sister) and Nelle (Harper Lee’s nick name), he moved more rapidly than most white Alabamians.”

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

This description of effective leadership speaks of character traits missing, not only in our current president but in our self-serving Congress, as well ... and so I repeat:  Our nation has been stuck between a rock and a hard place, overlong, so wherever effective leadership may be hiding from public view, ‘tis time to come out and lead the free world toward safely leaving our homes with family and friends without fear of being blown up or gunned down ...