I come from a family to whom politics is lifeblood. So when I heard that a member of the US Congress was coming to speak at my school, and that there would be a question and answer period, I was extremely interested. I hoped to discover the secret of what it truly is like to help run and regulate the last remaining superpower. Yet as soon as I began to research the record of the representative who had been chosen to speak at my school I was sorely disappointed. His record was as completely opposite to my own beliefs as would be possible. I felt as though I shared so little with this man in terms of how we viewed the issues, and thus I felt, how we viewed the world, that I wouldn't be able to connect with him enough to learn anything about leadership.

Throughout the question and answer period I seethed. I felt as though the representative was dancing around questions, refusing to give us his real views. And when he did tell us what he thought about the issues, and what his legislative votes connoted about his own beliefs, I disagreed with his reasoning and views regardless. I felt that many of his votes were helping to create legislature which would in the end hurt people, and I didn't think that his reasons for voting the way he did were enough to sanctify it. I spent most of the period writing my own responses to his replies on an index card; questions which I felt would make him think twice about the beliefs I so disagreed with, holes that I wished to poke in his arguments. I scribbled angrily and left with a feeling of self-righteousness; if only others would listen to my arguments, they wouldn't vote for such harmful legislature, or elect those who believe in it.

It was only later that I realized that it was me, not the representative who came to speak with us, who was in the wrong. I hadn't seen it at the time, but this man with whom I could find almost no common ground actually taught me one of the most important aspects of leadership; the importance of acting on your beliefs. My anger was as corrosive as his voting record seemed to me to be if I did nothing about it. Perhaps I disagreed with his views, but the representative who spoke to us was actually trying to change the country, perhaps to make it a better nation. He disagreed with things which were going on, and he went to work every day trying to fix them.

The "Students & Leaders" program taught me that what truly matters, what a leader ultimately is, is not someone who merely is upset by problems, by what is wrong in the world; a leader is the one who decides to do something about it. By listening to someone with whom I disagreed on almost every point, I learned something about leadership which I never truly understood before; the difference between scribbling notes on an index card and making things better.

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