To leave a positive footprint......

My few words in this week's print Herald Express 17 November 2021

My late mother sprinkled my childhood years with a variety of motivational phrases. One that seems particularly appropriate at the moment is “lead by example.”

Leading by example isn’t always easy, of course. As they say ‘the road to hell is littered with good intentions’ and that, in my opinion, is probably the way of things.

Setting out on a journey with good intentions is a good thing. Of course, as time passes temptations and other obstacles can knock you off, for want of a better phrase, the path of righteousness.

Sadly, at the moment we seem to be stumbling across a landscape where people who should know better are deliberately and blatantly setting very poor examples of good behaviour.

I’m not going to pluck examples of selfishness and an open disregard of the damage that poor leadership can inflict. It is that rather cavalier attitude to the wellbeing of others that troubles me.

Ah yes, the welling of others! When I was at school, we often wrote the letters AMDG at the top of a scribbled page. The Latin acronym simply declared that what we were about should be for the greater honour and glory of God.

Whether you believe in God or not is a matter of personal choice, but that aspiration that what we are about on a daily basis should be for the good of all. Is that too much to ask? Hopefully, it is not and yet the examples being set at the moment on the national and international platform might suggest otherwise.?

We now live in an age of instant communication and the growth of social media in the past few years has been simply staggering. Whatever we say and do can be instantly transmitted across the world. Unfortunately, much of that transmission of news is simply a soundbite.

Soundbites are slippery little things, leaving too much to individual interpretation. There was a time when a soundbite was restricted to an attention seeking headline leaving the story to unfold in the text. Now the text is simply that headline soundbite!

Over the past few days there has been explosion of comment about members of parliament having highly paid second jobs. Comments being made about that range from outrage through to complete ambivalence.

It’s easy to take a pop and ask why earning over eighty thousand a year as an MP isn’t enough and indeed how can they possibly find the time given the heavy workload. Is that a bad example to others struggling to put food on the table?

To be quite honest, I don’t really know. What I do know is that sometimes things are not quite as straightforward as they might seem. Yet often they are particularly straightforward and that mischievous manipulation to gain advantage is blatantly obvious. ?

What worries me in particular is the damaging impact upon the next generation. If they see a political elite simply shuffling pockets full of money into baggy trousers then what sort of leadership is that?

Whilst I may have the antics of a ruling elite in mind, we should also think about our own actions. As a septuagenarian, I find myself increasingly looking at my own antics over the years and asking whether I did keep the faith with my mother in leading by example. Hmm.

If, after a lengthy meditation I come up with the answer I will let you know. Meanwhile I will continue to do my best to keep the smile……?