What Kind of Leader Do You Want?

Time again to pick a leader.

Time again to try to put aside the babbling voices of bought-and-paid-for pundits and decide who will stand up for the people of this nation.  Time again to think of the future.  Time again to find someone who will not simply talk a good game on ensuring your future, but actually do it.

And time again, apparently, to watch the corporate titans of this land race to install a leader they can bend to their will.  A leader who will, when asked to, quietly maintain the status quo.

Corporate power has become a gale force wind that for forty years has decimated everything in its path – your wages, your savings, your healthcare, your voice.  It has bent your government to its will, reduced your free press to a billboard for its interests, and slowly but steadily eroded your power.  It has changed the United States of America to the United Corporation of America, an institution in which you are not a stockholder.

Whom do you trust to stand up to that power?

We’ve been deprived of true leadership for so long we no longer remember what it sounds like.

It sounds like this: whatever is oppressing you, I will stand up to it.  Whatever is harming you, I will make it stop.  Whoever cheats you, lies to you, steals from you, I will put a end to it.

The job of a leader is to have the courage you don’t.  It’s to fight the fights you can’t.  It’s to sacrifice their comfort for yours, and not give in to whatever threatens you, no matter how big its claws are.  A leader’s job is to have your back no matter how difficult that might be.

If you can’t do that, you have no business leading.

So what do you want?

Another leader whose personal best is to tell you everything you want to hear, then quietly capitulate once again to those powers while telling you that’s all they can do?

Another ineffectual “centrist” who will talk a good game on your economic well-being and then secure their war chest by selling you out?  Another blandly likeable drone whose idea of victory is letting it get only a little worse?  Who will tell you that standing up to that which has taken everything from you is radical, unrealistic, or even dangerous?

Standing up to bully is always a radical idea to a coward.  The thing is, leadership requires exactly that courage.  A real leader is not afraid of a bully.

Or in bed with one.

You cannot stand up to a power you’re in bed with.  You can’t be supported by corporate power and fight it.  You can’t hitch your wagon to the very thing destroying the middle class and then oppose it.

Wall Street has grown fat by keeping wages low, by ballooning the cost of medical care, by making the cost of a college education ten years of indenture.  It has turned your children’s schools into a factory for fat contracts and done the same to our military.  It’s taken your pension and your savings and it’s kept its tax rate low by raising yours.  It’s skyrocketed the cost of living while making sure you live hand-to-mouth.

And to keep the gravy train rolling it has hand-picked leaders either too stupid or too cowardly to ever say no.

Think of this nation’s economy as a tree bent all the way to the ground by that gale force wind.  To bend it back straight and true what do you need?  A timid breeze or a force as strong as that gale – one that will blow against it with equal power and force it upright again?

That wind isn’t going anywhere; the only question is how much more it will be allowed to destroy, and who will stand against it, and bring it into alignment with the needs and the rights of the people again.

The leader you pick will be the one standing against that gale.  That requires the courage of a lion and a backbone of steel.  It requires someone who does not believe victory is only letting the hole get a little deeper, but pulling you out of it entirely – and bending that tree back to a straight and even keel again.

Choose wisely, and choose well.