Since my last blog entry, I’m delighted to announce that
there has been a major development in the fight against the coronavirus. An advisor
to the Brazilian President, who met with and took photos with the Occupant of
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has tested positive with the virus.
The Occupant who had written off the “hysteria” surrounding
the virus as a “Hoax” created by the Democratic Party to hurt his election
process is now “concerned” and worried about coming into contact with people
who had the virus. The story on the Occupant’s concerns can be found at:
What’s happened? The reason is simple, until today, the
virus didn’t affect the Occupant on a personal basis. As far as he was
concerned, the virus was something that happened to other people and the fact
that it had the potential to keep his supporters away from his rallies, meant
that it was something that annoyed him enough to blame it on other people.
Well, it seems to be a different story now that it might
affect him. Hopefully the fear of getting the virus might propel him to take
the advice of experts a little more seriously and hopefully the “Most Powerful
Man” on the planet might actually be compelled to put the tremendous resources
of the most powerful government on the planet into the fight against this very nasty
bug.
In fairness to the Occupant, he’s not the fist and only
person to be propelled into action only when the problem has hit home. The
other point that one needs to look through is the fact that actions only really
take place when the people who count are affected by the problem. Pakistan’s
former military dictator, Pervez Musharraf once made the point that the earthquake
that hit Pakistan was far worse than the tsunami that hit all Southeast Asia in
2004 because the tsunami killed white people while the earthquake killed brown people,
whom nobody cared too much about. At the risk of sounding cynical, he had a
point – think of the big issues of the day that only big issues because the
problem only affected the right people. Terrorism, for example, only became a
problem when the USA got hit on 11 September 2011, even though the problem had
been going on for ages (I grew up in the UK in the 90s when the threat of IRA terrorism
was very real and the main sticking point in Anglo-American relations came from
the fact that the American Irish Community funded the IRA and Gerry Adams was happily
given a visa into the US while the British wouldn’t even allow his voice to be
heard on TV).
Michael Moore once wrote that you should pray that bad
things happen to be people in power because they then start thinking like human
beings. He gave the example of how the Bush II Administration did not come out
with “Anti-Gay” legislation despite being in the grips of the religious extreme.
He made the point that Vice-President Dick Cheney’s daughter is gay and the
Vice-President approached “Anti-Gay” legislation as a father rather than as an ideologue.
While we can see how we only make things a problem only when
it comes ours, shouldn’t we give our leaders a bit more slack? They are, after
all human?
Actually, the answer is no. People are put into leadership
positions for a certain reason. We expect them to stop the problem before it
reaches us and if that fails, we look to leaders for a plan to get us out of
the problem. We don’t expect leaders to behave like us, otherwise, well we
might as well work on the problem ourselves.
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