What Leadership Is

From Lincoln to Trump

During the height of the Civil War, cemetery construction was, of course, brisk. Some committee members charged with planning and location-finding for these proliferating grave sites approached Lincoln for some advice about a particular site. He said to them, “Put it where I can see it from the windows of my summer home. Thus, will I be reminded what my decisions cost.”

Can you imagine the Great Denier — Donald Trump — acting like the Great Emancipator?

Abraham Lincoln - Post-War

Two photographs of Abraham Lincoln, one taken before, the other (slide to view) towards the end of the Civil War. It is as if all of the suffering, pain and death endured by the young men he sent off to fight for the preservation of the American Union is written on his face  — a history of that terrible war etched by empathy on the countenance of the greatest leader the United States ever produced.

There is no need to show Trump, his self-satisfied visage is today as it was in 2016. The 100,000 plus dead from COVID, they are obviously not his fault. Race riots — no concern here except for order in the streets  —  why lose sleep? After all, Donald needs his beauty rest so he has lots of energy for his Twitter work slandering people and reinventing conspiracy theories.  

The respected American journalist and PBS commentator David Brooks almost broke down in tears last Friday when trying to do his week in review on the PBS Newshour. It was a remarkable and saddening thing to see.

I have never been more appalled at what is going on south of the Canadian border.  Where there should be efforts to inspire, to unite, to bridge differences, there is a vacuum, worse than a vacuum, a kind of anti-gravity emanating from the White House that severs the ties that should bind.  A puny man of dubious character with an overinflated ego and the empathy of a sociopath — perhaps the most egregiously unqualified person to ever sit in the Oval Office —  is now the titular guy in charge in time of crisis. How can a man like this bind up the wounds of a stricken and divided nation?

An American acquaintance recently reminded me of what he correctly thought was paraphrasing a Robin Williams line, saying to me; “As a Canadian you must be feeling like you are living in the second story apartment above a meth lab.”  I never felt like that before, I am beginning to feel like that now.