To get great leaders you need great voters.

To get Great Leaders you need Great Voters

In our home of the United States of America, we have a system that is trying to listen to American people’s voice as much as possible before making decisions that impact us every day such as who is our President. Are we as normal American citizens able to make the best decisions for us and other people? Do we as Americans have good enough education to be able to make logical decisions? In other words,  is our current system of voting for leaders the best system to pick great leaders? Our system of voting can get us people we like, but our citizens are not always educated enough to give us the leaders that we need for our country.

In the book “Lord of the Flies” many of the problems that happen in the books happen because of people voting for people as leaders that they know very little about though they could have made much better decisions by learning more about them before quickly deciding who they want as their leader based on very little information. On page 22 of the novel where Ralph is voted for chief, this is the reason giving for him being picked “Let him be chief with the Trumpet-thing.” And that was final he became chief because he was seen as a leader because of his ability to blow a trumpet even though he was not the one who originally thought of that idea… that person was Piggy of which pretty much at this point has given all the good ideas but got almost no credit for it. Now to give them credit, I doubt they understood the power that the people that wanted to be leader were going to have and the horrible things that they would do to get more of it/maintain it,but they decided anyway that they would put a lack of thought and understanding of who the people are before voting for a leader.

What happened here in the book could be related to a situation that recently happened in Britain since how they voted is similar to how we vote currently since they are also a Democracy. They voted to leave the European Union on June 23, 2016. The problem is that shortly after the vote was called for them to leave the European Union the second top google search in Britain was “What is the European Union?” The other ones do not get any better containing things like “What happens when we leave the European Union?” You have to admit that is pretty depressing that after making a huge decision that puts your whole entire country at risks you find out that many people in Britain were not educated on what the vote actually meant. Though this data is hard to ignore it may not actually mean much of anything because maybe those people that searched it did not actually go to the polls or maybe they were too young to vote but they wanted to learn more about what was actually going on. What I am trying to say that people should simply be educated enough to understand what they are voting for before they actually vote so they can make good decisions for their country.

Even after all the voting is done and a leader is choosing does not necessarily mean people will agree/follow the leader later on. This was seen in the novel in many chapters later on after the vote. Ralph was the leader but it ended up that most of the people that voted for him ended up betraying him because they ended up not agreeing with his ideas. One of the quotes that relate to this is on page 91 which is Jack which is Ralph’s enemy when it comes to who is leader, “And you shut up! Who are you, anyway? Sitting their and telling people what to do. You can’t hunt, you can’t sing-.” Which after Jack continues attacking him about how he is not a real leader and Ralph continues trying to defend himself which ends up not working very well. Maybe if Ralph did not get voted in and they picked someone that they ended up all liking (if that is possible) maybe none of the violence and drama would end up happening to them.

This is also seen in American History also not just in the novel. A lot of people (from his very low approval ratings of %22) saw our former president George W. Bush as a bad leader. He was voted into the office after winning by the Electoral College system by %2 in his first of two terms. People did not enjoy his decisions on the War of Iraq and the Economy most of all. The thing that really stands out is that even though he ended up getting very poor approval ratings throughout his presidency he was able to strike enough votes to get re-elected. Since I was too young during this time I do not really know what ended up getting him voted and what that time was like I could only assume there were reasons greater than the economy that people enjoyed about him to get him re-elected.

In conclusion, our voting system works best when people understand what they are voting for and/or who they are voting for. Our voting system may have flaws but it is the best way we currently have to get people’s thoughts on who should be the leader of their country.

Works Cited:

CBSNews. "Bush's Final Approval Rating: 22 Percent." CBS News. CBS Interactive, 16 Jan. 2009. Web. 29 Mar. 2017.

Selyukh, Alina. "After Brexit Vote, Britain Asks Google: 'What Is The EU?'" NPR. NPR, 24 June 2016. Web. 29 Mar. 2017.

Goldring, WIlliam Lord Of The Flies New York: Penguin, 2006.