Riddle me this ....

There is every indication that a great many Australians are not letting Thursday’s political assassination of our elected Prime Minister Kevin Rudd fade from memory, and are quite possibly not getting on with accepting Gillard as our new leader. A video of Rudd’s sad goodbye speech is currently one of the most viewed videos on YouTube in the news and politics category, and there are many different much-viewed versions of this speech on YouTube, with many comments attached, and within those comments can be found some heated exchanges.

After pondering recent events, one term that I would use to describe the recent actions of Gillard, and/or whoever it is that pulls her strings in the ALP, is the term “emotionally illiterate”. As I predicted there has been much emotional fallout from their actions and it has not done any good for the public image of Julia Gillard and the ALP. But how could this be? Gillard is a woman, and everyone knows that women are naturally most able when it comes to emotional literacy or emotional intelligence. What is emotional literacy? I believe it is all about knowing how to get things done without stepping on too many toes or upsetting people or making enemies, and being able to predict how people will act or react. I’d say Gillard looks like a “FAIL” in that department at the moment, but who can really tell?; the concept of emotional intelligence is as vague as the people who love to talk about it. Maybe Gillard does have a clue in that department, but she just didn’t care too much what the emotional consequences might be for her or for anyone else. But, but, aren’t women supposed to be by nature highly empathetic? A person who is a naturally over-endowed with empathy is surely not a person who would not care? This is a quite a puzzle. What is the solution? Well maybe the decision to act was not really her decision. Maybe she was seduced into the idea, as one commentator has speculated, or simply told what to do. Weak-willed or not, events could not have turned out as they have without Gillard’s consent. So what gives? Hey, maybe all those stereotypes about the psychological characteristics of females are a load of nonsense. Maybe women don’t essentially have super-powers when it comes to dealing with people. Maybe it’s just true that people are individuals, each with their own profile of weaknesses and strengths in the various human abilities. Or maybe most people are only skilled at understanding the psychology and emotions of other people who are similar to themselves? If being female does not necessarily mean one has some type of super-ability, then why is everyone getting so hyped over the moon because we now have a female Prime Minister?