The 21st Century Needs a Visionary Leader

Dear readers, this week has been filled with major events - riots in Turkey and Brazil, Syrian rebels receiving a nod from Barack Obama with his decision that the US will supply them with weapons, the Taliban and America fumbling their effort to get reconciliation talks started, a G8 meeting which saw Russia and the US in an arm wrestling contest over how to handle the future of al-Assad, and a major step in the long American debate about how to deal with the 10 million illegal immigrants already in the US and how to stop the inflow. When I consider all that's going on in our world right now, I keep coming back to basic questions - how to help people who are used to some form of democratic self-government govern themselves with civility and decorum, how to adapt people's natural but never-experienced desire for freedom into a government organized to respect both freedom and democratic desires while at the same time respecting culture and religion. I believe if we could answer these two fundamental questions, we would make the world a more peaceful and people-friendy place for everyone. But, I find very little being done to establish a framework for addressing them. There should be university chairs devoted to these issues and think tank units bringing experienced experts into the discussion. One of the problems with finding answers is that the world seems to have fallen into the habit of dividing people and countries along what I would call "We - They" lines. Some examples of this are : democracies vs all other forms of government, Christians and Jews vs Moslems, legal immigrants vs illegal immigrants, the world vs China, industrially developed countries vs non-industrially developed countries, rich nations vs poor nations. What seems to me to be wrong with looking at our world this way is that we suppress natural diversity of experience and thought processes. We thus encourage the dangerous "we - they" mentality that leads us to exclude everyone not exactly like us from the councils that make decisions for all of us. And the result is before our eyes, if we think about it - riots of poor people left out of the life they see on TV but cannot possibly achieve, "Arab Spring" insurrections when there is no other way to make political change, Tibetans immolating themselves as the only means they have to protest against the systematic destruction of their culture by foreign Chinese invaders, Americans calling for fences and mass evictions of illegal immigrants instead of trying to absorb them into a society that has always welcomed immigrants, small and less industrialized European countries being forced to create a culture and lifestyle that suits northern Germans but not Mediterranean Greeks or Spaniards. The examples seem endless. The results are always the same -- resentment on both sides of the we-they divide, suppressed anger that eventually spills out onto the streets, religious intolerance, a sense of frustration in world leaders because they don't know how to step across the unseen divide and so nothing seems to work. I am not a supporter of the 20th century's attempt to expand government so that people lose their sense of self-responsibility. People are responsible for their actions and for their lives. Government cannot and should not replace indivdual initiative. But - Athens had its Plato and Pericles, Europe had its Charlemagne, England had its Locke and Burke, America had its Jefferson and Lincoln. The 21st century desperately needs a visionary leader to guide the debate, hold out hope, find practical ways forward, love the people...all the people...of the world. Edmund Burke put it clearly 240 years ago : "I have no idea of a liberty unconnected with honesty and justice. Nor do I believe that any good constitutions of government, or of freedom, can find it necessary for their security to doom any part of the people to a permanent slavery."