Kristi Smith, November 24, 2003

I’m sitting watching children in the park as they giggle, involved in a game of follow the leader. The sun shines brightly in the afternoon sky and the cool wind rustles bowing branches over the river. Their charismatic leader raises his right hand and all the children watchfully, exuberantly raise theirs. I’m suddenly struck by the image of a small crowd of children, hands heaven bound, like Hitler’s neo-Nazi youth. Of course, I’m not trying to say that these children have anti-Semitism fermenting in their hearts, but the aesthetic quality makes me think of black smoke pouring out of oversized pizza ovens. Truly, all the children were only following a leader, being part of a group activity. Don’t we all do that? What I mean to ask is, “Do people knowingly follow leaders to be part of something bigger?” In the case of the children, they were doing only what they were supposed to do, what the kid next to them was doing; not trying to replicate the army of the holocaust; only playing outdoors.

Children are inherently base, a clean slate. They provide insight into underlying factors, insight into human instinct. Just as a kitten stalking shadows is teaching itself one day to hunt, the children are teaching themselves one day to follow. You could make the argument that they signed on to “follow the leader,” and that’s the reason they each did as the person next to them did. Don’t we accept our politicians in much the same way as the children accept their game leader? Children become adults and adults play the American “game of life.”

One day someone says you are an American and, as such, you pledge allegiance to your country in wild abandon for thoughtless patriotism. We accept our government and what it does as part of national heritage, a group we identify with, something we are all part of together, in much the same way as the children in the game accept each other and the orders they act out. Why do we accept these things? Maybe it is something hardwired into us, the desire, the need, if you will, to be part of whatever is the greater whole. Very few people go against the group sentiment even if they are going against their own personal morals. Even in mass murder, people still have a hard time stopping the game of “follow the leader.”

Stalin killed millions of innocent people in a genocide that went largely unnoticed by the world at the time. In 1956, Stalin’s right-hand man, Khrushchev, gave a speech on de-Stalinization. During a brief silence, someone in the crowd spoke out asking, “Why didn’t you stop him?” Without skipping a beat, Khrushchev peered into the crowd and called out, “Who said that?” No one in the crowd would answer. Khrushchev, apparently knowing this would happen, simply said, “That is why I didn’t do anything,” and resumed his speech.

Now, I must admit that I could find nothing to support the historical accuracy of what I’ve just said, but perhaps that isn’t important. The reason why that anecdote is powerful has nothing to do with the end of the Stalin era, the context from which it came. The reason it is moving is that it touches on something we can all understand, something within us all, the need to cling to the group we are identified with. No one in the crowd spoke, because they would lose their identity as part of the listening audience; just as no one stopped Stalin, because they would lose their identity as comrades. Whether good or bad, people want and need to play the game of life, of follow the leader; just as children need recess, Jews need Israel, and America needs “you’re either with us or against us” Dubya.