Do You Need To Withstand Poor Leadership To Get To Good Leadership?
By
Leonard Zwelling
By any measure, the United States is being poorly led.
The current president is a loose cannon of no particular philosophy beyond the self-serving. He is alienating our friends and befriending our former enemies and in this process he is upending the world order. He does not believe in multi-lateral agreements and wants to cut a separate deal with everyone. Even though he is right about our allies not contributing their fair share, that is a discussion that is best had in confidence using soft pressure not a bludgeon.
The president is right with regard to telling illegal aliens they must follow the law to enter the country, but he is wrong to separate kids from parents at the border when asylum is being sought. That’s just cruel.
Congress is no better.
Mitch McConnell is an awful man who denied the prior president of his rightful Supreme Court pick for strict political purposes and now is reversing himself with regard to the new SCOTUS choice in this election year. Of course, the Chuck and Nancy show is even worse as the Democrats have no leaders worthy of the name and show no signs of even having a farm team.
Half of Trump’s cabinet is corrupt and the rest simply inept.
There is no place to find any real leadership in the federal government. But could this be the storm before the calm?
I might think that if I saw some really excellent young leaders on either side of the aisle, but I don’t. Then again, there’s always hope.
In the darkest days of the Mendelsohn-DePinho years that stretched from 2001 to 2016, it seemed as if MD Anderson was in a downward spiral of corruption, conflict of interest, nepotism, self-dealing and dwindling financial resources. Then, suddenly, the sun came up. It is still a new dawn and it is yet unclear that the Pisters Administration will produce the excellence of the Clark and LeMaistre years, but at least the bleeding has been stemmed and the finances are on the right course.
We can hope that the new leadership of MD Anderson, even if much of it is the old leadership, will be worthy of the number one cancer care designation.
The same is true in the United States. Trump may have been needed to cleanse the Bush-Clinton axis from its entrenched hold on the White House. We will see what happens in 2018 and 2020. Maybe Trump may prove to be an aberrancy. Maybe not. Game show hosts may have the inside track in American politics forever or maybe a real leader will emerge. Time will tell at 1515 Holcombe and at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The sun may come out tomorrow. Or not.
