Pandemic, unemployment, climate change—what can we do that will effectively address each? Each requires leadership. Let us bolster local communities by taking the charge of local leadership seriously. If you’re up to it, consider where it is lacking and provide it. Learn as you go. Set about the improvement of your leadership each day.

Beyond the need for leadership, there are patterns shared by each of these crises, common ground in which their problems are rooted. Why not deploy solutions that are similarly rooted, that address important aspects common to each of them?

Perhaps the pandemic can be addressed by people newly employed for exactly that purpose, to address the pandemic. Their address could build up the social infrastructure required to then address climate change.

I’m certainly not the first to be the first thinking along these lines. After all, it could be called ‘a beautiful idea’. I can hear it now, that statement, “It’s a beautiful idea,” as though that were the end of it. Truth be told, there seems to be a lot more idea people than there are action people today.

Yet the capacity may be there, dormant, awaiting an awakening. How many leaders are not yet leaders just yet?

Let’s awaken that in ourselves, in our local communities. If we have coherent leadership, leadership that can see us through shocking and novel times, we can go a long ways to competently address more than just the pandemic, unemployment, and climate change. We can go even further.

But leadership involves action, not just talk. And where are the leaders today? They aren’t getting the media coverage we might like them to have. They are in the trenches, doing the work. Chances are, they don’t have time for self-indulgent political games.

What is the approval rating right now?

More than half of Americans disapprove of how the president, supposed leader of the free world, has been handling the most recent crisis.

The only risk in amplifying the voices of leadership in our local areas is that we might undermine the totalitarian dreams of those who seek to centralize all our systems and reap the benefits for themselves while we take the cost.

Local leaders, stand up. Set your villages and cities to task in their own improvement, and share the benefit of your learning with the world. Reach out to one another, invigorate greater and greater regions together, never forgetting that things can get so bad if we allow ourselves to backslide.

[edited: typo correction]