I still find the Shirley Sherrod situation shocking.
A blogger posts a video snippet of an address she gave to the NAACP many years ago. A major news network airs that snippet, damning her for racism. The secretary of agriculture asks for her resignation. All of this happened before anyone even bothered to say, “Gosh, how ’bout if we take a lot at that whole video first?”
I’m amazed that all of these people — and some very high-ranking people — just reacted with no thinking involved.
It makes me grateful that I work for a man who has a very unusual skill — he thinks before he speaks and reacts. When I first started working with our campus president, his skill took me a bit aback. After all, I hadn’t really met anyone before who thought — I mean really thought — before he spoke. That meant that there were occasional silences in our meetings.
At first, I wasn’t sure what to do. Most people I know – me included — would want to fill in that silence with something. But, I learned to wait because a well-thought-out response was coming.
Had a situation like this occurred on our campus, our president wouldn’t have reacted without reviewing everything first. He would have asked to see the entire video. He would have talked to her at length. He would have thought about how he would respond before he acted.
And our president, unlike our country’s president, wouldn’t have had to apologize for acting so hastily.
