Leadership is not about kindling baser human instincts, leadership is about having the courage to call them out and spur people to elevated ways and thinking. Leadership is about telling societies what’s wrong with them, not about swimming along with wrong
Mahatma Gandhi paid with his life fighting bigotry, prejudice and hatred, but fight he did through his life, waging against the tide very often and setting examples. We have sadly not only shunned the example but also begun to pride ourselves in mocking his message
Dog-whistling prejudice and hatred, gaslighting violence, spurring social dissonance and fracture can fetch you votes and power, but we know how such “popular” and “powerful” entities ended and how they are remembered.
Hitler, Mussolini, their Vichy proxies, Hirohito-Tojo were some of the most “popular” and “powerful” forces in their time. Look at the legacy they’ve left us, sense the crime and guilt of those that supported them because they were “popular” and spurred the killer tide.
How many years was #NelsonMandela in jail with not the faintest hope he could even seek a vote, much less hope for one cast for him? Should his years in the Robben Island prison have driven him to shun calling Apartheid and its South African practitioners wrong?
And here we are, with all our rich and prided heritage, reducing ourselves to the high click-bait wisdoms and binaries of “Lefticide” and “Righticide”. Such are the directions in which we have allowed our senses to be seduced.
Winning an election, wining a battle or war, winning an empire: there are those who colluded; there are those that applauded; there are those that revelled merely from the sidelines in the intoxication of victors, happy to damn losers. History is witness to what became of those
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