I have to confess…I love watching television. It doesn’t take much for me to sit down and watch most anything…with or without a plot or storyline. But over the past few weeks, there has been some interesting shows on that although completely set in in different times, they actually link together and illustrate what happens when leaders do not make important decisions.
A few years ago, I became fascinated with the perod leading up to and then through the Revolutionary War. The fact that men and women competely broke free from another government to start a brand new concept is pretty amazing (I mean it’s not like it was a start-up or something like that). The founding fathers, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison (and their wives plus a dozen others) created a new way of living expressing the importance of freedom. HBO is dramatizing this with their series, John Adams. It takes an in-depth look at Adams, his wife Abigail, their travels and the integral part he played in establishing the United States. But with everything he accomplished (he once served on 20 something committees making himself sick), the one area he and the other fathers wouldn’t touch was slavery. They all knew it was wrong and in complete conflict with the Declaration of Indepedence they had each worked so hard on. But they felt, it was easier to just leave it alone and let another generation deal with it. That, essentially led to the Civil War, 100 years later.
One hundred years after the War between the States, another leader was in the middle of a violent struggle (although he wanted it to be peaceful). On this the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination, taking a look at how these two American leaders intersect may be a fair exercise.
Adams was a strong leader, focused on the details. But he and his patriots did not have the ability to exercise leadership all of the way. Can you imagine what the last 200 years could have been if Adams, Washington and the boys would have gone all of the way? Who knows…maybe there still would have been a Civil War, just earlier. Maybe, the Civil Rights movement would have happened 50 years earlier. That’s the problem with not making decisions, you never get to know.
