Do We Expect Too Much From Those Who Aspire To Lead?

It struck me the other day as I was reading some news item, that we expect our politicians to be brighter than us, to have fewer faults than us and to never, ever have done anything dumb in their lives. I think that those are fair assumptions - we just shouldn't be terribly disappointed in those folks when it turns out that they are not quite as perfect as they suggested they were. I sometimes wonder if our disappointment in them is at least partially connected to our feelings of  us, one more time, being so stupid as to believe their self-stated perfection in the first place.

It feels as if there are more and more politicians publically being exposed for the humans they are - flawed (sometimes fatally), full of weakness and missteps, incapable of making a clear decision and sticking to it and generally being as incompetent as the rest of us. Some of these revelations are of course, the politician own fault. In a technological era of social media, where every pundit harps upon the importance of candidates and elected politicians to be connected to the "people" via various social media platforms, it is hardly surprising that some people fall into the trap of putting things "on paper" that they shouldn't.

One could wonder (and perhaps even guess) what the first Trudeau thought about the Queen or the separatists in Quebec or some of his ministers, but we did not get to know until he decided to tell us. For that leader and the thousands of other politicians, dissemination of their thoughts could not be instantaneous. The process of sharing their thoughts was filtered by the process of writing. All of us who write know that typing is faster than writing in longhand. The actual acts of holding a pen and having to reasonably carefully shape the letters slows down the thinking process. One actually has to think before putting the words on the paper. There was no delete button on the pen.  This process stopped or at least limited whatever stupidity that was circulating in our brain from leaking out.

While the blond headed buffoon/leader in the country to the south of Canada is perhaps currently the most famous/infamous politician who spews out what ever enters his limited mind - many politicians seemed equally as compulsed to share their thoughts and activities to anyone who has a Twitter account. We perhaps should be less judgemental as to what they write in the spur of the moment. If we want real, raw, unfiltered thoughts - if we expect them to be honest about what they are thinking - we probable should not expect particularly clear or logical thinking. Perhaps we should just accept that social media is at best a mechanism that at best, provides a superficial view of an issue, a view that is limited by both the lack of facts and a substantive discussion.

If we stop trying to use such platforms to have meaningful conversations and if we stop pretending that connecting to "friends" is a valid substitution for relationships - perhaps our politicians will attempt to communicate with us in ways that are more useful and less fraught with the risk of misunderstanding.