One of the strong pillars of a successful country is its leaders. When the leaders of a country are up to task and ready to learn, there is a very high chance that the country will progress. On the other hand, when all the leaders of a country care about is their own selfish benefits, then the country is bound to doom. Before the leaders get into power, they’re just regular citizens. But when they get into power, they become different people and start making decisions, both the ones that are harmful to the country and the ones that are not.
For a country to run smoothly, it needs rules. More importantly, it needs leaders to enact and oversee those rules. This is why citizens come together to choose leaders who would lead them rightly; people who will guide them by making right decisions. However, what happens when these same people are the ones making the country unsuitable for living? This brings me to today’s Hive Learners prompt: should citizens of a country be made to suffer for the decisions of their leaders? For example, when a country engages in battle with another country, the ordinary citizens who know nothing about the flight start to suffer. They suffer for a situation that they do not only beyond their countries but they also didn’t know anything about.
This topic reminds me of a heated argument I had with a group of friends sometime ago. “Should children be made to suffer for the sins of their parents?” In the Bible, there were times in the Old Testament when families or even nations suffered consequences because of the actions of their leaders or ancestors. I find this really absurd. Why would you punish someone who didn’t commit any crime, whose only crime is being related to the perpetrator. Anyone who commits a crime should be accountable, their sins should not be passed on to the next generation.
The New Testament challenges this view: that children should be punished for the sins of their parents. Everyone should answer for their own choices and no strings attached. Now, we can also relate this to today’s Hive Learners’ prompt. Should citizens of a country be made to suffer for the decisions of their leaders? As I mentioned earlier, each person is responsible for their own actions and there should be no strings attached. Most times, when the government makes awful decisions, the citizens are just as shocked as the rest of the world. They had nothing to do with such decisions, yet they will pay for it.
The answer to this question is no. Citizens shouldn't suffer for the mistakes of their leaders. When the government makes a mistake, they should get blamed, not the citizens. However, because the citizens and government are part of the same country, it is difficult to separate them. For example, imagine the government of a country launches a missile into another country, sparking rage and war. When the opposing country wants to retaliate, they wouldn’t say that they were attacked by the government; they would say they were attacked by the country as a whole.
We can’t really fix this issue. We can only keep praying that our leaders will make good decisions.
Image in this post is mine.
Thanks for reading.
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Many times it's the citizens that suffer the effects of the decisions of their leaders in their own country. The leaders in power actually making the right decision that will benefit the masses is highly dependent on the type of person that is a leader and many of the people in power already had questionable characters before they went into office