Reply #12: Very interesting post.

[H2O Man]

You raise a number of good points. One in particular is of interest to me, and that is how things change as one gets older. In the case of many leaders, a certain pattern takes place.

An example I like would be Red Cloud, the Lakota leader from the 1800s. When he was a young man, many of his elders considered him too militant; when he was older, the younger men thought he was not militant enough.

There have been some discussion about Martin Luther King, Jr., today. Even in his relatively short life, many older civil rights leaders considered him a bit too militant in the late 1950s and early '60s, and younger activists thought he wasn't militant enough by 1967.

There are, of course, many other examples, including people who were militant leaders in the '60s and '70s, and who are our elder statesmen today. They haven't sold out. Nor is it a case of them having been wrong in the past, but correct today.

People change with age. That's okay. A healthy society listens closely to both its young lions and old lions.

Thank you for this post.