No More Heroes
Too many people in my life have wanted me to be some great hero. They’ve talked to me about movement leadership and how people need leaders. They’re expressed disappointment when I chose to work with teams and lead democratically by growing other and new leaders.
The great man theory of movement leadership is totally bankrupt. People like to point to King, Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton as models of leadership. I completely disagree because once they were gone, the movements dissolved. For any organization, much less a movement organization to be a viable force for change, it must be able to survive without the founders and/or charismatic leaders. Everyone wants to be Che, but no one wants to wash the dishes.
I have heroes. Thomas Sankara because of his principled leadership, though it must be noted that it’s taken since the 1980s for Burkina Faso to recover from his assassination. Hunter S. Thompson for his creativity and insight. Myles Horton for his teaching, and Hank Williams for his poetry. Maybe these aren’t exactly heroes, but ancestors.
We should quit celebrating the charismatic leader and we should start celebrating the collective worker. The man or woman who makes sacrifices for their families so that their children can have a better future and even more mothers or fathers who sacrifice so that all children can have a better future. Billions of people do this everyday and these billions should be our heroes, not the charismatic leaders who often disregard the needs of their families for their own ego.
It’s no model of leadership to get murdered at 21 or 30 or 44 and the movement cease to exist. The model of leadership is that of the billions of people who try to live and support others as best they know how. That’s who I try to be and I will never be some charismatic fool ready to take a bullet for the movement.
That’s too easy.
You are a highly capable person. I can see it from here. You create insight. People want that but don't know where to get it.
As I read your essay, I thought about the terrible changes to the tax system the Republicans are pushing in Congress.. increase of 20 percent and more for those with annual income of less than $30K. It scares me, my income is around $14K (social security.)
I think Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and others you mentioned served a purpose. If it weren't for them, and the way they were treated, my ignorance would have continued unchallenged. Quite frankly, it continued too long even with their presence and actions.
Your ideas of collective work for change are what we need now. There are going to be a lot of people struggling to survive. Our government is determined to hasten the environmental factors (climate change, unregulated use of land and pesticides) that will put food production at risk. Increased biodiversity loss, due to habitat destruction of national lands, will cause increase in diseases without government warning systems or coordination of treatment.
People are going to be forced to work together or they will not make it. A lot aren't going to make it anyway.
This will go against decades of conditioning in our culture. The shame of asking for help and the idea that if we aren't making it on our own then we are failures persists.
We face a double catastrophe. They have taken a wrecking bar to government support systems when we need them the most. The environment that sustains us will continue to decline, causing problems we have never faced before.
I hope that you can find people to share your vision and prepare and organize and survive.