A Face, but No Body

A country is not just its leader.

America is not just Barrack Obama.
France is not just Nicolas Sarkozy.
Libya is not just Muammar el-Quaddafi.

The leader may be the face of the country, but he or she is not the country. The leader is one facet of the country, one person in power, one person to listen to, but not the country. In each of these countries, there are also the people, the businesses, and the children. All of these people benefit or suffer because of how the world labels the people in a country based on their ruler. As Arwa Alasama, a woman from Libya, says in an interview with New York Times, a developing country needs the help of foreign companies to help create jobs for the youth to better themselves. To do this, the masses of the world need to get over that face, the leader, of the country and help create those jobs. They need to stop judging the people by their ruler's actions.

An example of this is when Deng Xiaoping, in his campaign of the "Four Modernizations" after Mao's death, allowed foreign capitalists to open factories in southern China and encouraged wealthy Chinese businessmen that worked overseas to come back home. Despite China being Communist and the bad blood created during the Cold War, foreigners and the overseas Chinese businessmen did indeed come back to China and create new jobs. This greatly helped the Chinese economy grow, with per capita income doubling from 1978 to 1987. While Deng did other things to help the economy improve, such as bringing modernization to the countryside and allow small private businesses to be created, these things created fewer jobs on average than the factories of the imported businessmen.

While the leader of a country makes important decisions that effects the rest of their country, it is important not to judge a book by its cover or a people by their ruler. If we do, it can be detrimental to a peoples' economic health and as a result, a peoples' well being.

Floating Face Picture