Originally published in Loaves & Fishes, Clairvaux Farm, Elkton, MD.
When I rise, it will be with the ranks, not from them.
~ Eugene V. Debs
We cannot just be; we can only inter-be.
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
A wave emerges from the ocean, swells, rolls, crests, breaks, resolves itself into ocean once again, re-forms in many other emerging waves. The observer cannot tell that particular point at which it became a wave nor the exact moment when it ceased to be one. The wave was in some sense always there. And will always be. The wave was always an expression of the ocean and the configuration of a myriad of oceanic forces.
Our individual lives need vision. As a people we are famished for visionary leadership. Only charlatans seem to offer themselves. Either they have no vision to share or they do not seem to know how to lead us toward it. We know that we need better leaders; we believe that we deserve better. Out of a sense of frustration and discouragement, we blame the ones that we do have for not accomplishing all that we had hoped of them.
But leaders are the expression of the times in which they live, the particular personal and historical obstacles which they face, and, most of all, the hope and the will of the people from whom they come. They are the resultant vectors of innumerable forces whose conflicting, commingling, combining powers have thrust them upward and forward and to the surface.
We have the leaders we deserve. Are they opportunist? We have created the opportunity upon which they seize. Are they dishonest? It is we who have settled for half-truths. Are they shallow? Why have we not elevated the profound among us? Are they petty, mercurial, greedy, cold, pugnacious, immoral? Who but we can fashion from among us one who possesses magnanimity, equanimity, generosity, kindness, gentleness, decency?
Gandhi, the Great-Souled one, broke upon our century, an unforgettable wave, a wave everlasting in its consequences, a wave that has still not subsided, a wave that was carried forward again in Martin’s strong, sweet wave. And the waves of Vinoba Bhave and Badshah Khan and Lanza del Vasto and Danilo Dolci and Cesar Chavez and Ham Sok Hon and Dorothy Day and Dom Helder Camara and Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams and Barbara Deming and Aun Sung Su Kyu and wave after wave after wave.
We do have the leaders that we deserve. They have come and gone yet are still with us, returning to that ocean, returning to us, remaining part of us, pushing us forward, and us carrying them along. They will come and go again. They are the best of what we are, that to which we collectively must give expression, that to which we aspire, that of us which cannot be stopped, cannot be moved, cannot be turned, no matter what their own personal fate.
Leaders are not chosen, in the strictest sense of the word. They do not happen to us. They arise from us and return to us and are sent forth again. They are our experiments. They are our attempts at forms of thought and action, at the ratification of relationships, at the establishment of processes and institutions which reflect the essential face of reality: connection.
So much of what we have learned about “independence” is based on a flawed view of reality and has to do with habits of thinking and acting which tell us that we are alone and must act accordingly. So we do, and are forced to do so increasingly, by the kind of world our individual actions shape.
For example, a society based on individual independence– as opposed to personal responsibility– puts stress on the need for each of us to succeed in reaching our goals. Emphasis is placed on my performance, in comparison to and as opposed to each other person around me. Driving in traffic, walking down the street, working our jobs, our ultimate task is to triumph, each one alone. My job is to win. Many, many aspects of our world have been designed to teach us the lesson of “independence.” Our art, literature, music, recreation, transportation networks, housing patterns, decision-making methods, means of creating and distributing wealth, and ways of expressing ourselves in everyday language, all tell us: each of us is on her own, on his own; and little help is to be expected. Individuals are ultimate, we are told at every turn. Individuals are sovereign. Individuals are all alone.
But this independent individual is a contrivance. It is not our essential nature. It is not what a person is. The boundaries of a person are not so well defined. The past of any person is made up of the loves and labors of countless other people to whom he or she is indebted. The future of that person in inextricably bound up with the hopes and successes of countless others. We are not sovereign, isolated marbles, rattling around in a can. We are not even “peas in a pod.” We only exist because we lean on one another, go into and come out of each other, unite with one another, cooperate with one another, support one another, move forward together. Feelings of greed and hatred are fostered which create the delusion that we are alone and that the “dividing wall of hostility” will always stand. But we share much more than we horde. Every day we, the people, honor hosts of relationships and ratify new ones on the sheer basis of their decency. We hold doors for one another. We bear one another’s burdens. We reach down and help someone up. We stop and give someone our spare change. We go out of our way to do a kindness or say a complimentary word. We take the time to thank one another sincerely. We go to the trouble of trying to express our admiration or affection for each other. We decide to put our personal energy and resources into enterprises whose outcome is cloudy, whose benefit to us is not evident, and whose claim on us threatens to be more than we bargained for, yet whose appeal to our moral sense is indisputable.
We, the people, resist the currents of thought and action, so strong in our society, which would reduce us to looking after Number One. The fiction of Number One is a being with no ties to the present nor to other human beings. A person does not act that way. A person cannot act that way. People cannot live that way. We, the people, live interdependent, mutual, intermingled lives. We live lives that are bound together, lives that lap and re-lap and overlap upon each other’s. We strive to create conditions which more perfectly express our unity. We are deeply unhappy in, and ready to change, situations in which we cannot be good to one another.
The individual, the leader, seems to rise from the ranks. He or she needs no one else. But the individual is a myth or, rather, a bad dream. We, the people, rise with the ranks, not because we ought to, though this is probably true; but because people’s lives depend upon staying in contact with each other. A person must be able to reach back and feel his or her connection with the multitudes from which he or she came and of whose collective life he or she is an expression. A leader must reach back and feel the push of the people from whose impetus he or she arose. Being lost is being out of touch.
We do deserve the leaders we have. We are our own, best leaders. Each person is that leader. You are that leader. All that you have done to bring another person up with you, all that you have done to represent the best that is in the people from whom you come, every time that you have insisted on better treatment for people other than your own, all the joy you have felt in the success of others, every wise policy you have supported, every compassionate act you have done, has helped to create a rising in the level of the tide, a rising of the ranks, whose power, because it is more fundamental, exceeds that of the consent of the governed.
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