Senior Week, Leadership, and Love

We have been going through a downsizing at work and the folks who took the voluntary severance package just finished their last week on the job. Many of them were near retirement and the package gave them enough incentive to go ahead and move into retirement now. With so many senior folks leaving, this past week has reminded me of high school days when the seniors were getting ready to graduate. Deja’ vu all over again, as Yogi would say. In addition, my daughter turned 20 and so for the first time in 16 years we have no teenagers in the house. That passage out of the teen years also made me think of the milestones and passages in life. It was a strange sort of week in that way.

Of course, some younger folks who were considering a new direction in their life also left. One of those was a man who had worked in my team as a project leader and is moving to Canada to join his new bride. They were married shortly before this severance package was announced. He is from India, though he spent much of his teen years in Canada, and he met his wife on the internet via a match-making/dating service for Asian Indians. She lives in Canada. Since marriages in India are traditionally arranged marriages, that approach seems to fit. He is an avid reader, so I am giving him a copy of The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis as he leaves and begins his new life with his new bride. I suspect that those from cultures of arranged marriages have fewer unrealistic expectations about romantic love than those from cultures like America, so the message that ‘Eros makes promises that she cannot keep’ may not be as desperately needed in his case as it is in America, but I suspect he has lived here and in Canada long enough to have been corrupted by our culture.

That our culture desperately needs this message was made clear yet again this past week by the news of the Argentina affair carried on by Governor Sanford of South Carolina. While the press rarely gets anything right, the comments that have been in print about how he felt that this woman was his soul mate, that this is about love, and so on indicates that he certainly does not yet understand about Eros and her promises. There has been such an ongoing stream of these types of revelations among governors, presidential candidates, preachers, and others in power that I am beginning to wonder if there are other lessons here as well. So many of these ‘leaders’ have such enormous egos that it seems to me that we have a cultural problem in not being able to tell the difference between egotism and leadership. So many of our ‘leaders’ appear to be leading when they are mostly just serving their own ego. They seem to do the same in their relationships with women, serving their own ego and thinking they can talk their way out of anything. And so many women, for their part, seem to prefer this fast talking, outgoing, self-serving type, often choosing them over men who are more introverted but also more reliable and less self-centered. While the ability to communicate is important, it is not enough. For my part, I will take depth and integrity over skillful rhetoric any day. It seems to me that many women, like the electorate, do not recognize the difference between leadership and egotism either. It should not be a surprise that so many have swooned over the words of Obama regardless of his lack of having ever done anything of consequence and regardless of his arrogance. That seems to be the concept our culture has of leadership.

Meanwhile Gov. Sanford clearly still has lessons to learn. Perhaps I should have sent him a copy of The Four Loves too.