Brick by Brick

 By Joe Wilson 

Over the summer, I received an unexpected email from my high school social studies teacher. Each year, my alma mater—a small Catholic high school in Northern Kentucky—hosts a retreat for the senior class. My teacher invited me to participate in this year’s retreat, asking me to prepare a talk on leadership. Without hesitation, I accepted. Although I initially felt unqualified to speak on such a topic, I was eager to share my perspective and immediately put pen to paper.

Reflecting on my understanding of leadership from four years ago, when I was a high school senior, I realized how much my perspective has evolved. At age seventeen, I never thought of myself as a leader. My senior year coincided with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when everything felt unmanageable and out of control. Seeing thousands of people—including my friends and family—fall ill with a virus that had no cure left me feeling helpless. I believed there was nothing I could do to change the situation, so I waited, hoping elected officials and the nation’s top doctors would find a way to end the crisis.

Now, looking back, I see that waiting for the world to change is not enough. Too often, we expect others—especially political leaders—to step up and fix what’s wrong while we watch from the sidelines, critiquing their every move. How often do we turn on the news and complain about how broken the world is? We vent our frustrations on social media, shifting the burden of responsibility onto others and blaming those in power when things don’t improve.

I am definitely guilty of this myself. When I think of leadership, my mind automatically conjures images of people like Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, or Margaret Thatcher—extraordinary men and women who rose to the pinnacle of power and left an indelible mark on human history. With these models in mind, we may easily equate leadership with power. When crises and tragedies strike, we turn to the people in positions of power and influence for solutions. Because most of us lack that degree of power, we often view our individual efforts as insignificant or meaningless.

In these moments, my mind turns to the song “Beautiful City,” featured in Stephen Schwartz’s Godspell. If you’re unfamiliar with the song, I highly recommend giving it a listen. In addition to its gorgeous melody and orchestration, the song is replete with haunting lyrics that speak to this exact feeling:

Out of the ruins and rubble

Out of the smoke

Out of our night of struggle

Can we see a ray of hope?

One pale thin ray reaching for the day…

We can build a beautiful city

Yes, we can (yes, we can)

We can build a beautiful city

Not a city of angels

But we can build a city of man

We may not reach the ending

But we can start

Slowly but truly mending

Brick by brick

Heart by heart

Now, maybe now

We start learning how…

We can build a beautiful city

Yes, we can (yes, we can)

We can build a beautiful city

Not a city of angels

But we can build a city of man

When your trust is all but shattered

When your faith is all but killed

You can give up bitter and battered

Or you can slowly start to build…

A beautiful city

Yes, we can (yes, we can)

We can build a beautiful city

Not a city of angels

But finally a city of man

With all the injustices and sorrows that afflict our world today—war, poverty, disease, persecution, natural disasters—solutions to these problems can seem perpetually out of reach. Yet, while we lack the power as individuals to end these global atrocities, we are not helpless. Because of the inherent fallibility of human nature, no generation will ever deliver a perfectly just or peaceful society. At the same time, we must never give in to the temptation to throw up our hands in resignation because we see the world as irredeemably corrupt and wicked.

We all possess unique talents that we can use to make small, incremental improvements to our local communities. As these lyrics remind me, if we cannot build a perfect world, we must find the resolve to seek small solutions to the problems that face our own neighborhoods, schools, churches, and workplaces. For instance, we may not have the power to end world hunger, but we can set aside a few hours each week to volunteer at a local food pantry to serve the direct needs of our communities. While the scope of our individual efforts may be small, we can still create a lasting impression from these acts of service.

Therefore, we must reimagine what it means to be a true leader. We must discard the notion that leadership is reserved for presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, and military generals. Leadership is a responsibility each one of us possesses, here and now. When we see something wrong in our community, we have an obligation to seek a solution ourselves. We mustn’t sit back and wait for someone else to take the initiative.

Leadership is not measured by the size and scope of our influence; instead, it is measured by the intention and dedication that underpin our service to the greater community.While our individual efforts may be mere drops in the ocean, they do contribute to the broader evolution toward a better world. Even though we will never actualize our visions of a perfectly just and fair society, we should always strive for a higher standard.

The challenge for my generation is to embrace this responsibility: to contribute to the slow, deliberate work of creating a more compassionate and just society—one brick at a time.

Joe Wilson is a McConnell Scholar in the class of 2025. He is studying political science and history.