Leadership Woes, Or, Down to the River to Pray

This is one of those posts where a reader can say to me, “if you can’t say nothin’ good don’t say nothin’ at all.” Well, so be it.

I’ve had one phone conversation, one e-mail conversation, and read one blog this weekend that has caused me to reflect on a long standing observation: there is something twisted, corrupt, and sick when it comes to leadership in Greensboro and Guilford County.

It didn’t take long after moving here in 1989 to notice this. It was, well, pretty obvious from reading the paper and watching the news. I didn’t realize that it even extended to leadership in many churches, this desire to circle the wagons and protect and keep truth from the light of day.

The sickness seems to involve an incapacity to accept responsibility; a lack of will to hold leaders accountable; and an almost conspiratorial refusal to bring truth before the light of day. Adding to this malaise and madness is the hyper partisanship of local papers and too many local bloggers who seem almost incapable of acknowledging the good in their political opponents and the faults in their political friends.

No, I don’t mean everybody, no I am not going to say who I mean and don’t mean, and no, I am not going to cite sources….

Despite it all, many good things in our city seem to happen due, ironically to me, to that special interest group I most love to hate – developers! I laugh.

There is a deep human yearning for justice, for things to be right. It is right for people to be angry and upset when human beings are mistreated. I know that we can’t beg off these issues.

But one is left thinking that something greater is needed. That Someone greater is needed. We seem almost, as it were, under bondage to something we cannot defeat. No, I don’t necessarily mean the devil. I don’t really know what I mean. Maybe it is bondage to generations of ill will, bad blood, evil practices. It’s been going on a long time here. Maybe something unique to our history is behind this – something not shared with other similar southern cities of similar size. I really don’t know.

But what I do know is that while many good people in the trenches fight the good fight, vainly perhaps I don’t know, many of us perhaps should re-devote ourselves to praying for our city. And though I am a Christian I would call people of all faiths to pray for our city.

Meantime, I hope Chewie will share about the animals in Battleground Park, and I hope there is a place for writing about things that don’t relate to these issues that seem never to resolve.

Because life goes on. We still work and garden and go to movies and listen to music and make love and dance and watch birds and see plays and do art and play with children and walk our dogs and cook (slowly) and pray and worship and fix our cars and another hundred things.

And we still need (whatever governmental polices we support), as individuals and groups of twos and threes and tens to help the homeless and reach out to the widow and fatherless and stand up for the helpless and reach across the line of race and creed and socio/economic class to love our neighbor as ourselves. We still need to work in the small places where we live to make our little corners of the world as beautiful and as good and as right as they can be. I hope there is still a place for that stuff in the blogging world too.

And meanwhile, facing the childish and brutish and covetous dysfunction of our local leadership and of the local “powers that be,” and overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness, I hope that many – alone, in groups of two, or three, or maybe even more, will be called to quiet places, places where they can settle their anxious hearts, take in the beauty that remains, and go to work, praying that is, for our city. It needs our help. It needs more than our help.