A leader is no better than the people that he or she leads.

 My thesis is that the speed with which the world is changing is greater than humans are capable of managing.  Our reaction to change is to welcome it when it benefits us individually, resist it when it does not, and try to ignore it when it forces itself upon us.  Wherever possible, we build artificial realities in which to hide and, all too often, raise false leaders to guide us.  We can not fathom the enormity of the problem that we face with too many mouths hungering after limited resources, so we quibble about the price of gasoline, the age of the fetus, the sign on the bathroom door, and our precious feelings.  We are too busy with our own individual lives to worry about anybody that lives outside of our non-existent borders.  Were we to honestly assess the status of humans living in far too much of the world, including our own ghettos, we would better understand the reason for the severe deterioration of the world order, as well as the increased antipathy directed at us from abroad.

Because of our still powerful economy, and our massive nuclear capability, we remain the strongest nation on earth, in spite of the increasingly wimpish nature of our populace, but very unfortunately, we have some very powerful antagonists that are growing closer to one another due to the antipathy they feel for us.  While we remain the most lethal power on earth, the nature of conflict has changed sufficiently that no one is going to win the next major conflict.  Today, you and I, out here in the hustings, are arguing among ourselves whether we should elect a little girl that we pretend makes us joyful, or an elderly megalomaniac that wants to restore us to king of the hill.  I choose the megalomaniac because his failings are less likely to cause as immediate a problem as are the failings of the little girl, but  I do not see either one as adequately addressing the root cause of our problem - the changed nature of our society.  

We are no longer the country that we were when our parents were alive.  The “Greatest Generation” was born in the depression, tempered in nasty person-to-person conflict literally all over the globe, and dedicated to making the world a better place in which to live.  My generation tried to live up to their expectations and failed miserably, even as we had some tactical successes along the way.  The generation that we are raising is the product of those failures.  We honestly believe that we can improve our own security by surgically eliminating individual bad guys with “over the horizon” technology while pretending to improve the lives of the masses with artificial intelligence and virtual whatever.

I think a lot about leadership.  I have led people, sometimes in life and death situations.  I fully understand that a leader is no better than the people that he or she leads.  I repeat, a leader is no better than the people he or she leads.  There is no question in my mind, but that we have an extremely serious leadership problem, but the more serious problem, by far, is the changed nature of our society.  We are, today, a bunch of small, petty, selfish, confused wimps and the world is waking up to that fact.  The next serious argument that we have with one or another of our nuclear antagonists is going to fundamentally change the way in which humans live - no matter who claims to have “won.”