Where are the leaders?

I was just reading something that Gavin (The Greening of Gavin) wrote on Simple, Green and Frugal and it made me realise something; something so obvious it seems stupid to even comment on it..... that we are each not on a single journey but everyone is part of the journey of everyone else.

But, it is only when you step outside, when you trip on your path, when you notice a seed germinating or a flower opening, for the first time, that you have the chance to shift your journey, to blend it with others, to grasp a thread of the web. Often, people are in such a rut that they do not ever see beyond their narrow, dusty path and develop the skin and outlook of a dinosaur to protect themselves from reality.

This is why we need true leaders; people to make waves (and policies) which change people's journeys for them, giving them no choice, because we all have a vast web joining our journeys and we can only stretch this way and that so far, before the web becomes unravelled. Sadly, for some reason, leadership these days is often confused with making money, not waves. We cannot, it seems, change those policies which will take us all along an unknown path, even if we all know that the old path ends with a cliff we must climb eventually, because big business might not be able to keep up and where would we all be without it?

Did you know 20,000kg of butter was exported from New Zealand to Australia last year? And 20,000kg butter was exported from Australia to New Zealand!! But this cannot be stopped because it provides jobs and looks good on graphs. The Chinese are buying up Tasmanian farms at an alarming rate but this cannot be stopped because it is good for the real estate industry and helps the farmers. Why is this happening? Because the farms used to be major vegetable suppliers to companies such as McCains and Coles supermarkets and even McDonalds but now the farms lie in waste because vegetables are shipped in from China, giving the Chinese money to buy up Australia!

Our journeys are all entwined..... yours, mine, 2 billion Chinese people, nearly 2 billion Indian people, hundreds of millions of Americans, British, African, Asian, Russian, South American, Middle Eastern, 22 million Australian, including the 800 residents of Cygnet, and the 500,00 other Tasmanians. There is not one true leader amongst the heads of any of these countries...  that I know of.... and that is very, very scary to me.

I am not scared of change, but I am terrified by the lack of it, when it is so necessary. I rise to challenges and have ideas for change bursting out of my head every day. I can grow nearly all my food. I can walk nearly everywhere I need to go. I can influence and help people I meet to face these changes BUT I cannot find a single world leader to admire and look up to; one who is embracing change for the opportunities it gives for new ways of doing things. So it comes down to us all to make the waves and force the change, or risk our web being destroyed and our 6 billion journeys converging at the bottom of a very big cliff.