Longing for a True Leader

Yesterday, my husband and I celebrated Valetine's Day by exchanging cards in the morning. Later, I had a haircut. I stopped at a Chinese carry-out we like and picked up sweet and sour chicken and egg rolls.

I brought them home, and we had the movie Independence Day on while we ate. So we had lunch and a movie for our Valentine's celebration.

The movie, in case there is someone on the planet who hasn't seen it. is about an alien invasion on July 2. Large, massive ships move in over every major city on the planet. Bill Pullman plays the president of the United States. It is soon apparent that these aliens aren't here to exchange daisies or chocolate chip cookie recipes. They annihilate the major cities with a big blast from their spaceships. The president and his young daughter barely escape, and they flee to Area 51. It seems there is a spaceship and a deceased alien there, under study.

A character played by Jeff Goldblum figures out how to upload a virus into the alien mothership. Will Smith's character, a fighter pilot, joins Jeff's and they fly up and insert the virus, which breaks down the alien ships impenetrable shields. The big alien ships are brought down. Earth is saved.

At one point near the end of the movie, Pullman as president makes a speech to bolster the scared young flyers who are going to attack the alien ships.

After we finished eating and the movie ended, my husband wondered when we had last had a president capable of such leadership.

Maybe JFK, I suggested. I was six months old when he died.

Perhaps Eisenhower, long before my time.

No one who has led the country in my lifetime could have stood up to an alien invasion. We can't even stand up to an invasive virus, a pandemic that has taken as many lives as one of these alien ships took when it blasted away a city. We have not had leadership since 1963, and who knows how Kennedy would have turned out if he hadn't been shot. He may have been a political puppet, too, in the end.

Having a bully for a president does not mean he is a good leader. The former guy showed us how he would deal with an alien invasion - he'd either hide in his bunker, or he would tell us not to worry about it and wouldn't care how many died. He'd call the alien leaders and offer them the world if they'd leave him alive.

Having a president who would walk out onto the White House lawn with his wife and dogs and offer the aliens a teddy bear is not the kind of person to lead the country during an alien invasion, either. He would be first among the dead. The current president tried for about 8 months to lead the country out of the pandemic, but he was not able to. He could not bring the country to heel.

The people resisted. Not for the good of society, but because, well, we're assholes. While resisting an actual alien invasion would be a good thing, resisting a viral invasion instead of nodding to science and stepping forward to take a vaccine and do the right things was beyond us. We are no Greatest Generation here, ready to stand up to moral ineptitude, capable of marching off to save the world. We are a bunch of whiny pansy butts who sit around and cry about our second amendment rights and things like CRT, about which we know nothing, and fume and fret because we aren't getting what we believe to be ours, whatever that is.

If we had a real alien invasion like in this movie, I know of no one in government who could step up to lead, to inspire, to literally talk us into saving the world. Even Obama, as well spoken as he is, could not do it because the white people wouldn't listen to him. The racism runs so deep many people don't even know it's there.

This was our Valentine's Day discussion. We talked about the loss of leadership, the demise of democracy, the changes in humanity that are not for the better. Capitalism may have made some people rich, but it also turned everyone into individualistic automatons, incapable of caring for their fellow man. It destroyed the social network that is, ultimately, vital for the survival of the human race.

We are lesser people than our forefathers. We are soft and stupid. We have all the knowledge of the world at our fingertips, and we look at pictures of cats.

What wimps we have become. What a shame. What a disaster. What a deformation of character we have suffered as we moved through the Industrial Age and into the Technological Age.

If the aliens arrived tomorrow, we'd all deserve to die.