Leadership is not community organizing. Leadership is when you step up to the plate, take a firm grip on the bat, and face the challenge of the curve ball on the outside corner. Thereby, setting the example for others to follow.
From the outset this president has failed miserably when it comes to leadership. You don’t sit in the White House and wait for things to happen. You don’t constantly carp about Congress’s lack of inaction and then head to the golf course. You don’t blame and criticize the former president for billion dollar deficits while all along creating trillion dollar deficits of your own.
If you ask people who was the worst president in modern history the answer always comes back Jimmy Carter. But Jimmy Carter was the one who took the bull by the horns and got Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to Camp David.
Carter provided the leadership that resulted in the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt which stands to this day. Not an easy task! For the most part the election of our president is a popularity contest. The average American on the street doesn’t know the first thing about what goes on in the world. Nor do they seem to care. We are a spoiled lot. We take our liberty for granted and we don’t understand how easy it is to lose the liberty that so many Americans have given their lives for.
We are too willing to trade liberty for government handouts these days. Liberty is more important than life itself. It was one of our founding fathers, Patrick Henry, who coined the phrase, “I know what course others may take, but as for me give me liberty or give me death.”
This cell phone generation we are now raising may just wake up one day and find out they live in a far different world than the hope and change they envisioned and voted for. A world where a
tyrannical government rules them based on a narrow set of religious beliefs and enforces those beliefs with a deadly iron fist. After all, if we don’t guard our liberty and the freedom to live our lives as we wish, we can all say hello to tyranny. Or maybe we should just follow our presidents’ lead and go play golf!
Larry Oscar is a graduate from the University of Tulsa and holds a degree in electrical engineering. He is retired and lives with his wife on a lake in Oklahoma where he brews his own beer, sails, and is a member of numerous clubs and organizations.