A Gaping Hole

On December 23, 1776, Thomas Paine published The Crisis in which he penned the following:

“These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

Here we now are, almost 250 years later and our current situation once again calls on the duty of each individual to come together bravely as one. We struggle with our choice of direction and action because when we look for leadership all we find is a gaping hole. The singular guiding voice that we all internally crave is silent and in that void panic creeps forward to fill the vacuum. It is this panic that is the source of power for the mob. It takes hold directly in a few who, like a disease, seem to infect and thus motivate others to the most base of human behaviors. It is also true that leaders do not create courage and honor in their followers, they only inspire them to act in kind. So in these times of collective difficulty and void of leadership we must look to ourselves for righteous motivations. We must search for, discover and then exhibit to others that which a true leader would have inspired from us. In these singular moments of self-discovery and then action we will collaterally inspire others to act. We will begin to fill the gaping hole, made vacant by the absence of leadership, one person and one act at a time; creating a positive force of the courageous rather than a panic driven mob. This time will pass and in a future private moment each of us will look back on our behaviors. Let us act now in ways that allow us to later be proud; an honest and well deserved pride based on the knowledge that we individually inspired one another and then rose together to meet this challenge when leadership could not be found.