And What of Courage?

   Clearly, great leadership involves courage, a word from the French meaning
"an act of the heart."  Courage is a companion of Conviction, which not only means a powerful belief but by extension, the determination to act in accordance with that belief, to bend the world to that belief. The word, "conviction" comes from a Latin root that means "subdue"...so to believe and to subdue reality in alignment with that belief. 
   An obvious person who comes to mind here from my teens is Martin Luther King, Jr.  This man had an exquisitely fierce belief in the rightness of his cause.  While his first and immediate focus was securing the rights of blacks, he fought for the rights of all humans.  He went into the streets...was arrested, threatened but undeterred.  This was Courage and Conviction operating together for maximum potency, girded by King's Clarity and his Consciousness of the broader issue. In fact, we can readily see all of the C's operating in him, as we do in Gandhi, the man who so deeply influenced him.
   Some might ask, "What separates such a leader from, say, a monster like Hitler, et al?  Aren't all these men marked by most of the C's you're talking about?   The answer is actually quite simple:  they are lacking in Compassion.  And this returns to the point I've made earlier that the C's are not a menu but an ensemble and that all are necessary to achieve great leadership.  A great leader has Compassion, even respect,for those who oppose his efforts.  He knows that if we sacrifice our compassion to hatred in defeating another, we will be ultimately little or no better than he. A great leader lives in accordance with the deepest teachings of all the wisdom paths humanity has given rise to: to live thy neighbor as thyself, to turn the other cheek, to live thine enemies.  To the degree that we fall short of those teachings, we still have plenty of work to do.
   King was a man, so I would not be surprised if people close to him saw flashes of anger, sadness, even bitterness.  All leaders experience such things and those experiences are not a negation of their compassion but just a mark of their humanity.  If we demand absolute purity from our leaders, we are denying their humanity, and our own.  In fact, the longing for heroes may, to some unfortunate degree, be driven by such a denial of the complexity of our emotional nature. Beware of absolutes.  No one can measure up to them over time.  So the question is not, "Are you compassionate every second every day towards those who oppose you?"  The question is, "In the long run, what is your disposition towards all humans, including your enemies?"  King demonstrated a rare Constancy in his practice and portrayal of an all-encompassing compassion that ultimately is the only true path away from violence in our species.