The first lesson about leadership I learned, was as a ninth-grade football player and the quarterback for my high school team.

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. --Abraham Lincoln

The first lesson about leadership I learned, was as a ninth-grade football player and the quarterback for my high school team. We were led by our coach, lets call him Coach Jim, and he coached us in a way Ive since learned by personal experience and study, is about the worst strategy to bring folks together. The worst way to motivate others. The worst way to unify disparate group of folks. The worst way to lead.

He was a bully.

He ruled the field and the locker room, not with inspiration or support or encouragement or joy at play, but instead with fear; with threats, with anger and with such meanspiritedness that he drove me to quit the sport, one Id loved since I first took to the gridiron in the fifth grade. At practice the air was filled with expletives, shouted at full volume at the team, and so we learned to just put our heads down and play, hoping Coach would not single us out for a tongue lashing before our peers. We were afraid of his wrath. The violence of our sport was reflected in the violence of his rhetoric and actions.

When he did wind up to let us know how he was really feeling, his face would turn a deep shade of red, and the spittle would fly from his mouth and his words would flow with such contempt for us that we prayed for play to end early. Coach was in a bad mood. The irony is that for all his blow-hardy speeches and closed-fist threats and arrogance, our team played awfully. We allowed him to divide us and be pitted against one another. He imagined he was bringing out the best in us, I suppose, but the truth was he was a terrible coach. That season we lost more than we won and rarely had any fun as we played.

So much for a bullys ability to lead, to evoke the better angels in human nature.

I couldnt get this notion of bullying off of my mind as our nation went to the polls and decided our national fate and direction for the next four years. It has been an ugly, ugly campaign season and an ugly, ugly year for human behavior in our land. Who could have imagined the image of armed protesters, bullies, storming the state capitol in Michigan this summer in response to the lockdown? The blatant disregard, even contempt, so many of my fellow citizens have shown for science and public health, that folks would actually see the rejection of mask wearing as a symbol of liberty, patriotism even?

Are we living in a parallel universe? Is this really America?

Though in some places the threat of COVID has brought us together and inspired compassionate and wise leadership, in other places, for lack of such moral leadership, through bullying leadership, the virus now threatens us two-fold. First, with the threat of getting sick and then with the threat of watching us come apart at the seams as a country, our devolution as a democracy.

Instead of leaders evoking the best in us, our angels, too many leaders instead evoke the worst in their followers. Inspire violence and hate, not peace and cooperation. Call out for cruelty and not compassion, meanness and not mercy.

Last March as COVID spread throughout the land, I was idealistic and hopeful. I prayed to God that this shared threat would bring out the best in us as fellow citizens. To each do our parts to keep the whole healthy and well and unified. To sacrifice for a neighbor: to mask up and distance and take good care. Together, we would get through this. When Americans are unified, anything is possible.

But if competent leadership is not there to move the masses to act with such virtue, it will not happen. So, even though we are facing into the worst heath crisis our nation has faced in 100 years, are now almost eight months into what might continue for another year, we are sick in a way. We are diseased civically, and we are in critical care as a national community.

Thats the price we pay when bullies lead.

Chaos. Fear. Danger. Incompetence. Disunity. It doesnt matter if it is on a football field or in a family or a corporate boardroom or in the halls of government.

Thus, in the days ahead I offer this prayer for our land. That we might be led by those who bring out the better angels of our nature, as Lincoln once said. That we might move off of the sidelines of democracy and get right into the thick of it, into the contest. Vote. Organize. Be informed. Take responsibility for our citizenship. That America might live up to the noblest of our shared ideals: neighbor helping neighbor, and always, ALWAYS remembering.

We are all in this together.

The Rev. John F. Hudson is senior pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn (pilgrimsherborn.org). If you have a word or idea youd like defined in a future column or have comments, please send them to pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

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