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Al Swift's Commentary:
Followership?
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Sometimes you can’t even lead the horse to water.
Politicians are frequently criticized for failing to lead. Worse, they are charged with having no vision of where to lead. The ultimate condemnation is they are too timid to lead. All are true … sometimes. Maybe even a lot of the time.
However, if the public ever rewarded politicians for leading, there might be a lot more of it. Leadership requires followership. Usually, leadership is most necessary when the going is hard, inconvenient, expensive, or dangerous. Yet followership fades when a leader must ask for sacrifice.
Way back in the 60’s, I remember the late Sen. Henry M. Jackson traveling our home state of Washington giving a speech about the coming energy shortage. Gasoline was selling for something like 39.9¢ and there was plenty of it. The Senator was enormously popular. He once pulled over 80% of the vote in an election against a credible opponent in what has always been a two-party state. But, even with that, he could not get anyone to pay attention. Some years later, as we were all in interminable lines waiting to buy gas (and, now, shelling out over $2 a gallon) one heard people grumbling about the politicians. Why did they let this happen? Why don’t they fix it?
In that regard, a quote in the June 2004 issue of National Geographic caught my eye:
?People should be doing something now to reduce oil dependence,? says physicist Alfred Cavallo, ?and not wait for Mother Nature to slap them in the face.?
Well, maybe I’ll get to that … just as soon as I buy my new SUV and write that letter to my Congressman telling him to get off his duff and bring those gas prices down.
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