Today I read a number of Mother Jones' articles about George Santos', the "fabulist." Santos' lies and corruption have a long international trail and many unanswered questions. In summary, the ever changing facts of his life simply don't add up and point to cheating, corruption, and suspicious connections. The reality that a conman like Santos wove his way into the House of Representatives is dangerous and frightening. As I read about this conman, I am reminded of Epstein who similarly lived a life of lies, lies that conned many high-level politicians, business people, and leaders the world over. It's almost impossible for people who value the truth to believe that people can live a life of lies like this, but clearly they can as we've witnessed via the lives of Trump, Epstein, Santos and more.
So what can we do to protect people and our government from these self-serving, destructive, dangerous con artists?
Background checks
We have to take background checks more seriously and apply those checks to people who are running for office or serving in any capacity of leadership. Most businesses do run background checks on people. The challenge here is to use background checks in honorable ways rather than ways that exclude people from jobs and leadership positions due to prejudice or bigotry. It seems to me that to run for office in the United States, you should have to have a basic level of education and knowledge about our government--perhaps the ability to pass a citizen's test should be a requirement. You should also have a respectful background, not one of corruption, lawlessness, and lies. I'm not exactly sure how we can do this in a fair, public way, but the Santos' situation demonstrates a need for this kind of oversight.
Leadership protocols and expectations
There seems to be a need for protocols related to honesty, lawfulness, collaboration, respect, and good work for our public leaders. For many of us, this has been a long time expectation, but Trump demonstrated that these expectations are easy to explode in public view. Trump acted without the decorum, character, honesty, collaboration, and respect most of us expect from public leaders--instead Trump and his cronies have done whatever they wanted throughout their leadership days with a clear focus on propping up their personal wealth, privilege, power, and pleasure rather than serving the people of the United States in honest, respectful, collaborative and positive ways. How do we hold public officials' efforts to work that reflects good character, service to the American people, honesty, and lawfulness--what can we do? We need to find ways to limit or eliminate poor, dishonest, dangerous leaders from public office.
Leaders in any sphere that cheat and work with dishonesty and disrespect usurp valuable time, resources, and potential--they're exhausting at best and dangerous and destructive at their worst. While looking for ways to eliminate these kinds of errant leaders or at least hold them in check, we also have to focus on the good possible, and forward what we can do to spread the good news of honest, uplifting, and enriching leadership--the bold, courageous, collaborative, inclusive kinds of leadership that truly works to better the lives we live and the government we believe in. We can do this.