A Mad World Masquerades

Ever given much thought to YOUR world? You know, the one many of us tend to take for granted. Do you realize just how far its breadth and depth easily extend beyond our families, our neighborhoods, and our places of work? No longer does it merely reside in our places of worship, our villages, towns or cities, our country, or even our continent. It’s no longer tied to nationality or race. Your world and my world, more than ever before, have evolved from a world of ‘me’ to a world of ‘we.’ Its borders will not be contained within riches or religion, gender, geography, or generation. It is a world neither popular nor politic. Ours is a world much, much bigger than many realize. Yet it is refreshingly intimate and near.

It’s also a world under siege. Robert Greenleaf, who coined the phrase servant leadership as a contemporary measure of the serving nature of leadership, observed, “Awareness is not a giver of solace—it is just the opposite. It is a disturber and an awakener.” “Able leaders,” Greenleaf suggests, “are usually sharply awake and reasonably disturbed. They are not seekers after solace.” And, if the following state of affairs are any indicator, they are very much in demand. Just within the last 3 or 4 years, it’s been reported (Hawken’s Blessed Unrest, 2007) …

• The Dayak peoples of Borneo (more than 200 ethnic groups) face siltation, erosion, and destruction of their homeland from extensive clear-cutting of primary forests and water and crop pollution from oil companies

• The Ijaw and Ogoni people of Nigeria have seen the rich Niger River delta devastated by oil pipeline ruptures, air and water pollution, toxic wastes in their rivers and fisheries, and firs from the accidents and flaring of gas

• The Kogi of Colombia face extermination due to aerial spraying by U.S. planes of herbicide cocktails (Agent Green) designed to prevent the cultivation of coca, which the Kogi do not grow as a cash crop

• The Wapashani of Guyana are challenging patents on their native foodstuffs by multinational corporations

• The Garifuna of Honduras are protesting the construction of resorts and developments on expropriated land

• The San people in Botswana have been banished from their ancestral lands of 20,000 years, the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park and the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, in favor of tourism and diamond mining concessions, and now face extinction in resettlement camps

• The Lenca of Honduras are fighting an IMF-promoted law that allows for removal of indigenous people who live adjacent to mines and mineral deposits

• The Arhuaco of Colombia are subjected to guerilla warfare between paramilitaries, drug traffickers, and the Colombian army within their lands

• The Adnyamathanha Aborigines in the Flinders Range of Australia confront radiation spills from uranium mining

• In Chile and Argentina, Barrick Gold proposes an open-pit mine at Pascua Lama that will destroy portions of three different glaciers, literally blowing them up to uncover what will become a large open-pit gold mine at the headwaters of three rivers

• The Maasai are being displaced by large-scale, export-oriented agriculture in Tanzania

• The Bagyeli, Sara, Mass, Mundani, and Hakka people in Chad face oil wells, pipelines, and destruction of their way of life from petroleum exploration

• The Anuak faces upheaval and violence as the Ethiopian government makes way for oil exploration in their territories

• The Embera-Katio of Colombia have been displaced by the Urra Dam, which flooded their ancestral home

• The Gwich’in people in Alaska confront ongoing threats to drill in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge

• The people in northern Alberta (Cree, Athabasca, Chipewyan, and Dene) face proposals to build the world’s largest nuclear reactor to power expanded oil exraction from the Athabasca Oil Sands

• The World Bank and several international oil companies are financing a pipeline that cuts through the heart of Mindo Nabillo Cloudforest Reserve in Ecuador which is expected to precipitate oil drilling in the territories of the Seoya, Siona, and Cofan people

Similar stories are on the hearts and minds of people around the globe, from Morocco to Brazil, from Norway to … the United States of America.

Consider for a moment the tale-tale signs of oil exploration and drilling by large familiar corporations: contaminated soil, toxic waste pits and rivers (hydrocarbons, heavy metals, salts), air pollution, illegal logging, crime, and prostitution. Other signs include natural forest loss, permanent habitat conversion, fertilizer and chemical runoff, water pollution, carbon emissions, threats of species endangerment, loss, and extinction, wide-spread disease (cancers, skin lesions, breathing problems, malnutrition), violence, and heartbreak (e.g., the wellbore tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico). The biggest offenders are easy enough to discern (alphabetically): Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Russia, and the United States of America. Shall we now add Great Britain to the list? When weighed against indigenous sovereignty, “complex trade rules, corporate interests, and international agreements” easily strangle and dismantle legitimate resistance and tear deep into the very fabric of native cultures, natural habitats, and our children’s future.

Corporate and political privilege, position, and power tend to pursue and exploit globalization at any cost; there’s is a survival of the fittest mindset where coerced assimilation, indifference, cultural irrelevance, “civilized” domination, and patronization, especially if their pursuits are conducted in isolation in remote parts of our world, are an accepted way of life. For them. Is this leadership? Are we left with no recourse other than to complacently throw our collective arms in the air, apathetically compromising our values and conceding all that is right to the condemning actions of a ‘trusted’ few who abuse the privilege of power and position entrusted by the very same people they exploit, all for the sake of expediency?

The most salient issues of our day — water, hunger, poverty, deforestation, loss of language and culture, climate change, conservation, human rights, and education, among others — will not go away simply by wishing it so. And we cannot expect worn out places surrounded by worn out faces to quietly disappear simply by willing it so.

What are we to tell our children, and our children’s children?

Seems to me they are not looking to us for advice. They see one world, and they want us to take action, to be a positive role model, an example they can proudly emulate. The time is now, as I see it, to nurture servant hearts.

Indeed, the serving nature of leadership recognizes we possess the wherewithal and we have an opportunity to help make whole those with whom we come in contact; in 21st century terms, that ‘contact’ includes the use of sensing devices, satellites, video cameras, and the Internet. Villages in the remotest jungles now find a home in our neighborhood. In his essay, The Servant as Leader, Greenleaf writes, “There is something subtle communicated to one who is being served and led if, implicit in the compact between servant leader and led, is the understanding that the search for wholeness is something they share.” This general awareness and, more specifically, the leader’s self-awareness, strengthens one’s understanding of ethics, power, and values while lending itself to a more integrated, holistic position on pertinent matters of concern.

Left unaddressed, pertinent matters of concern can overwhelm us. Though many in our midst are drowning their sorrow for fear of no tomorrow, servant leadership undeniably offers great hope for the future in creating better, more caring, communities and organizations. Though daunting challenges generate urgent and compelling needs for people the world over, servant leadership puts forward heart and soul to correct, not create, convoluted conflict responsible for manipulating and intensifying man’s inhumanity to man. Though a global age imposes a reactionary will on so many who find themselves running in circles, servant leadership gives us reason to pause in celebration of servant hearts, standing stones who quietly lead through love, serve with gratitude, and graciously place others first. Servant leadership helps us find ‘greatness’ again, making whole all who sojourn with us.

Emerging leaders, young and young at heart, arise! It no longer need be a very, very mad world.

“Mad World” Lyrics

All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places,
Worn out faces

Bright and early for their daily races
Going nowhere,
Going nowhere

And their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression,
No expression

Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow
No tomorrow,
No tomorrow

And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying
Are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you
‘Cos I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It’s a very, very
Mad World
Mad World
Mad World
Mad World

Children waiting for the day they feel good
Happy Birthday,
Happy Birthday

Made to feel the way that every child should
Sit and listen,
sit and listen

Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me,
No one knew me

Hello teacher tell me what’s my lesson
Look right through me,
Look right through me

And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying
Are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you
‘Cos I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It’s a very, very
Mad World
Mad World
Mad World
Mad World

And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying
Are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you
‘Cos I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It’s a very, very
Mad World
Mad World
A raunchy young World
Mad World