The President Was Elected
To Serve the People, Not The
Other Way Around
Essential Values For A Leader: Truth, Honesty, Empathy
By Steve Rensberry
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RP News – 1/20/2025 – The euphoria that supporters of the new administration most likely feel is going to be short lived. Salvation is here, they can feel it. The bad guys have been held at bay, and justice – meaning they get more money and freedom for things they value, and everyone else gets less – is just around the corner. Euphoria is blinding though, talk is cheap, and the unintended consequences are unpredictable. There's also a word called NO, not to mention a long list of other measures and resistance efforts that people and authoritarian governments have never successfully curtailed, and never will, including this one.
The president was elected to serve the people, not the other way around.
Forward thinking Americans may have lost a battle last November but the war is a long way from over. For more than two centuries the United States has been a nation of laws, with a legal system built on established precedent and respect for the rule of law. Not all of those laws have been right or good, but the principle has generally held. Not so much anymore, given the make-up of what has become an untouchable Supreme Court, which make the future more uncertain and our lives more at risk. Mobster rule, tradition-makes-right, authoritarian words in books wrongly deemed holy and sacred – all seem more and more to be prioritized over reason, over mountains of facts acquired over centuries even. How can that last?
What is sacred when authoritarians and ideologues are in the driver’s seat? Greed, selfishness, money, exclusion, hatred of immigrants, to name just a few things. In religion-speak, greed and selfishness are easily justified as “prioritizing one’s family, church, and country,” extreme wealth and material riches as “blessings,” and discriminating against people who have different lifestyles than yours, though legal, as “exericising one's religious freedom." Flat out ignoring contrary evidence and rational arguments is deemed courageous or justified if the person has decided “in their heart” or believes “by faith” that something is true. The reasoning process and all the associated facts and elements with it get short circuited.
Most of us assume we need to learn more to understand more, but there's also a great many who seem to think they know all the truth they need to know before they even crack open a book or conduct an experiment. They just know, intuitive, instinctively, via a revelation to them personally or implanted in them at birth, and if you don’t believe them, you’re the stupid one.
Ruthlessness in business, no breaks given to the persecuted or downtrodden, a minimal social safety net lest any one person cheat -- all are virtues rather than vices to a certain kind of group and individual, the kind that does not feel what other people feel; nor, if they do, care about those feelings; or at least imagine it acutely enough to feel sadness at other people’s pain.
The People's March in D.C. on Jan. 18, 2025, and at other locations around the county in support of democracy and the protection for people's civil and human rights, was an inspiring show of force and a civil and Constitutional act of joyful resistance. Don’t give up. Things will change and those of us who are committed to it will make it happen, sooner or later.
The current individual in the White House would not be president if not for a corrupt legal system and corrupt representatives who have failed to hold him accountable, purposefully delaying proceedings until it was too late. If the system is rigged against anyone, it's rigged against the people.
Photos by S. Rensberry (taken on Jan. 18, 2025, Washington D.C.)
