Last week America was shocked when the governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, was arrested by federal authorities on a host of charges, the main one saying that he was planning on trying to sell President-Elect Barack Obama's open Senate seat. Almost immediately, people across the United States started calling for the governor to resign, something that he still hasn't considered a week later, and according to his attorney, he has no intentions of doing.

Even though I join the chorus of those who believes this governor can no longer lead the state, I acknowledge that the hardest thing for someone to have to do is leave a job they're doing for the uncertainty of not knowing what's coming next. Sure, Eliot Spitzer of New York did it earlier this year when caught up in a prostitution scandal, but the difference between the two, other than the wide span of ethical indiscretion, is that Spitzer was already a very wealthy man, whereas Blagojevich's net worth is supposedly around $400,000; not really all that much in the overall pantheon of things.

Still, it doesn't matter. Every day there's someone calling for someone else's job because of some issue that someone else perceives they should be fired for. Sometimes it's not even that person's direct responsibility for the person who committed the error, but accountability always resides with the higher up. Back in February, I wrote about the situation in Tampa, Florida, where the quadriplegic was dumped from a wheelchair because the police didn't believe he was disabled, all in front of multiple supervisors, who laughed and didn't try to help this man, and I said at the time that not only should all those supervisors be fired, but that the top guy should either be fired or resign because that kind of thing represents a culture. However, I doubted at the time that the top cop would retire, and I was right. After all, once again, I'm messing with his income, and he wasn't even there. Accountability sometimes isn't enough to make someone go away when finances are a concern.

Of course, it's easy for all of us to tell someone else what they should do with their professional lives. If we had to put ourselves into that situation, how would we handle it? Well, I know how I'd handle it, as I wrote last August, and it wasn't even for a situation that I had caused. There's this thing about honor that I grew up with. Sometimes it's about preserving your own honor; sometimes, it's about preserving the honor of what you do.

I remember when Bill Clinton was hearing from many people that he should resign back in 1998, and I kept wondering why, since he hadn't broken any laws, just shown a lapse in judgment. What Blagojevich is being indicted for is something much worse. Yet, every day, there's some degree of negative behavior that prompts someone else to say that a person should either resign or be fired.

I have a position, but I don't have an answer to this one. Every person who's a leader, if they're a good one, should make the determination as to whether something they're being accused of can be corrected and the better good improved on. If so, maybe they should stick around and ride out the storm. If not, then they should leave and let life get back to as much normalcy as possible.

But sometimes, to the person involved, the answer isn't so cut and dry.