I know many of us around the world are saying that in spite of the tremendous disruption and setbacks the world is going through, somehow the pause is having some good.

I speak of the pictures we have seen of clear skies without smog and car fumes; families at home together; fathers with their children; rest and plenty of it.

No one in a hurry to get there because there is nowhere or there to go.

We don’t know how tomorrow will look, but yesterday was leading to hell.

This is a time to reset attitudes. I believe that I was born and raised during a time when the attitudes and even principles were different.

Yes, it was during segregation when the issue of inequality was blatant and real. However, the society I lived in wanted a better life and it was possible for leaders to be born unto societies, like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, or Elijah Muhammad and so many others.

Leaders become leaders only because they are lifted up by people and supporters.

We don’t have that class of leaders today — not because they don’t exist; more so because we don’t have persons who will support good over evil.

All over the whole world depicts this same phenomenon and is the indictment of our age, when we as societies accept bad behaviour, we produce bad leaders, bad or unprogressive ideas, systems that are openly unjust or unfriendly.

We openly embrace sectarianism and elitist snobbery with the attitude “well, that’s the way of the world”. When yesterday we called it out, it was unacceptable and we wanted better.

The adult suffrage, the civil rights movements and even labour movements were all because we wanted better. That’s how we fostered leaders in the past generations: leaders rose to the occasions that we created, rather than becoming mavericks with the mobs and pimps of the chicanery.

We can’t fault our leaders when they are a product of our selves. Great societies produce and promote great leaders, bad societies ostracise and crucify the good. This isn’t new; it has been the pattern of recorded history since the trial of Socrates

The cold reality, and the truth of this hour that we are now living through, is we will either come through better and more progressive or will be worse and on our backsides.

Great trials make great people or they bury them.

This is a time for our humanity to shine when all the qualities that flow from our true humanness such as compassion, empathy, openness and sharing prevail in abundance.

Then there are those who, notwithstanding the gravity of the situation, will profess all of those virtues, but in their hearts and secret confines deliberate vain pursuits that will bring no gains except turmoil.

This is indeed a good time to reflect. Life is not really difficult; it is easy and meant to be so.

Yes there will always be challenges and difficulties, but with every challenge there is an answer and it comes with ease.

Each of us is endowed with common sense, but too often we refuse to acknowledge our own common sense and prefer to follow the herd. The law of life is very simple: in order to receive good, do good.