Friday, August 10, 2007

Eulogy of our Democracy

Many of us are just tired of people who call free speech treason. Where we come from that's a dictatorship, not a democracy.

We are not just a nation of factions. We're a people. We share common principles and ideals. And we rise and fall together.

There was a time in this country when the voices of great leaders lifted us up and make us want to do better. Where have all the leaders gone?

Why are we in this mess? How did we end up with this shit? Well, we voted for them, didn't we, or at least some of us did? But I like to remind our leaders what we didn't do: We didn't agree to suspend the constitution. We didn't agree to stop asking questions or demanding answers.

If a leader never step outside his comfort zone to hear different ideas, he grow stale. The inability to listen to dissent is a form of arrogance and injustice.

A leader has to communicate with his people, hear them out, face reality and tell the truth. Nobody in our current administration seems to know how to talk straight anymore. Instead, they spend most of their time trying to convince us that things are not really as bad as they seem. I don't know if it's a denial or dishonesty, but it start to drive us crazy.

A leader has to be a person of character. Abraham Lincoln once said, "If you want to test a man's character, give him power." But our leaders are showing little regard for the grievous consequences.

A leader must have courage, and in politics, courage means taking a position even when you know it will cost you votes. A leader must also have conviction - a fire in his belly. He's got to have passion and got to really want to get things done right. A leader should also have charisma which is the quality that makes people want to follow him. It's the ability to inspire and the followers trust him.

Most of all, leaders must be competent and have common sense. To be competent means to know what he's doing and more importantly, he got to surround himself with people who know what they're doing. A leader has to know who his true friends are, and it's not always the ones who agree with everything or follow him blindly. Common sense involve the ability to reason. If he don't know the difference between a dip of horse-shit from a dip of vanilla ice-cream, he'll never make it.

Accountability in our administration is now a slippery business. How do we know what's actually being accomplished? Talk is cheap.

There is one thing the folks on Putrajaya do seem to be good at: building bureaucracies. But at the moment what we needed most is to be lean and mean. We're beginning to get the suspicion that maybe the point of government is the bureaucracy, not the results. Politicians like to wage great fanfare. The government had declared war on poverty, war on drugs, war on crimes. But it is noticed that once the big campaign is rolled out and the politicians have all patted each other on the back, we never hear about it again. Come to think of it, what could be more urgent than figuring out how to run a country that works?

You may chuckle, but can we realize how much of our government is run by cronies? Wouldn't any CEO be both ashamed and afraid to appoint obsequious instruments of his pleasure (better known as ass-kisser)?

You can't bully the citizens into submission and expect to win cooperation by calling them monkeys or goblok. The greatest impediment to getting along is having preconceived notions. The lessons of history would have told a different story, but history was never consulted. This planet is a crowded place and the only way we're going to survive is to learn to get along with each other, and one another. Facts are pretty hard to ignore. It is the job of the leader to make tough decisions - to look ahead and say, "What can we do right now to help solve our crisis and social disintegration."

I have news for the gang in Parliament: We didn't elect you to sit on your asses and do nothing and remain silent while our democracy is being hijacked and our greatness is being replaced with mediocrity and autocracy. Why don't you arse show some spine for a change?


Adapted from:

Where Have All The Leaders Gone?
By Lee Iacocca with Catherine Whitney

3 comments:

Helen said...

Good piece. :-)

Can't wait for the next GE. Hopefully with the right msg, a true leader will emerge.

We have enough 'heroes'. We need good leaders.

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Anonymous said...

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