April 14, 2019
The shock of seeing the new look at Lefty’s place didn’t wear off quickly. In fact, I spent the entire time it took getting back to our little ranch pondering how Lefty’s leadership group and their big money sources were going to deal with this new situation. After I unsaddled Hubris, I gave him a flake of hay and then put him out in the pasture behind the barn. I told him to take a good rest and that I wasn’t sure where we were going next. Until I could get a handle on where Lefty’s power group decided to put their money—and that means—who they were going to put it on, I had better be very careful with my advice. In spite of Lefty’s leadership confusion there was one simple fact that worried me the most. That was: I could see very turbulent times just ahead, perhaps even ahead of the next big election, and the US of A would desperately need the most capable leadership we could find to get us through those times.
Jack’s bunch had one very big problem. As we out in the west would say, “They were stuck with the elephant they had rode in on”. Even a key member of Lefty’s oldest leadership was doing her best to tell her followers to stop trying to throw the rotten elephant out of office, let the election do it. Lefty’s bunch had 19 or 20 little problems (who all had announced that they were entering the competition to be the chief) and the actual number seemed to grow larger each week! Their leadership’s big problem was to pick the team that would put them back in the country’s driving seat. That’s what I am trying to help them do but as Hubris well knows, “You can lead a jackass to water but you can’t make him drink!”
I found myself getting a bit sleepy from all of my political pondering so I poured a glass of Uncle Jack’s finest and sat down in my recliner with a note pad and pencil. There was one other critical factor that Hubris and I were more concerned about than either of the two big leadership groups even seemed to think about and that was, “What did the voters really want?” I thought about that for a long time then I remembered——The last time around they voted almost equally for a known liar-thief-woman and a known con-ego-driven mad-man also known to be a totally vulgar person, as well as a liar, tax-cheat, draft-dodger, braggart, and white-supremacist with no political experience. Maybe the ideal candidate for our society would be a bi-sexual, molester (of boys and girls, equally), bank robber (bank robbers usually don’t pay income taxes), dropout who never finished high school and who hates everybody but believes him/herself to be the second wonder of the world? That thought was stirring around in my head when I took my last sip of Uncle Jack’s finest and——–
I woke up, with a shudder of realization that I had had a very bad dream that seemed almost too real. My dream had just described the “persona” of our country’s present fearless leader. If that was what our voters really wanted we Americans deserved to get what that chief would do to us and we were already—in only under a little more than two years of his leadership—in deep do do! I had dozed off while sitting in my “Lazy Boy”, holding an empty glass in my right hand and a blank yellow note pad in my left. My orange pencil was on the floor. The reading lamp next to my chair was on “low” so I must have turned it on while it was still light outside. As the fuzziness in my brain began to clear, I decided that it was time for me to go to bed. A good night’s sleep might clear my head.
Instead of clearing my head, I woke up with a big, bad, nasty head-ache. By breakfast time I had come to the realization that both Jack’s and Lefty’s leadership problems were due to the same cause—bad management within a system that had been corrupted by money and the lack of morality. In a nutshell—the evil forces of lust for power and privilege, avarice and greed had overcome the moral imperatives of faith, hope and charity—not only in our two main businesses but also in the electorate that enabled them. After a big bowl of shredded Ralston, I saddled up Hubris and with a hearty Hi Ho Hubris, Aaawaay! We were off to visit with a wise old man who lived almost at the top of a near-by mountain. I wasn’t dealing with a simple little management problem, I was dealing with a moral-societal problem of the highest order! I needed the counsel of a wise old owl.
Copyright, April 14, 2019, Louis J. Christen