The Anonymous Public Servant

On the wall of my office hangs a photo I return to at the beginning of each semester.

It is a photograph that I snapped as my host daughter Suci and I were leaving the Grant Memorial Lawn in the waning moments of President Obama’s Inauguration ceremony in 2009 -- of a young man who, out of moxie or despair, shimmied up a stoplight at the corner of  3^rd Street and Independence Ave. to witness the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next.  Atop the atoll of the light box, dressed in a black North Face jacket, he looks across the tenebrous swell of lives below toward the Capitol balcony, his arm curved casually about the light pole for support. 

Further afield, atop the immense dome of the Capitol Building stands another figure — the bronze Statue of Freedom.  Within my point of reference, she and the man on the lamppost are mirror images of each other—assuming the same posture, with garments the same tincture of aged bronze.  From a distance, they could not be set apart. 

From the moment the sight of them caught my eye, passages of Alice Walker’s poem “Light Baggage” began running through my head: “there is a magic/lingering after people/to whom success is merely personal.”

Walker had dedicated the poem to three Harlem Renaissance writers — Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nella Larson.  Each of the writers had left New York to seek the heart of their craft in a life of public service.  The first became an elder within a Quaker community, the second a freelance journalist and substitute teacher, the third a nurse. 

Written as an honorarium to them, it is, however, ultimately a poem about the anonymous servant, the you and the me, the young man on the traffic light who is not merely there to witness a spectacle, but to sanction, by his very presence, a new government in our democracy.  As Walker concludes her poem she draws out this point in a beautifully rendered series of metonymic images:

if a hundred photographs survive

each one will show a different face.

someone out of step. alone out there, absorbed;

fishing in the waters of experience

a slouched back against the shoulders

of the world.

I return to this image and its lyric counterpart at the turn of every semester as part of my preparation to teach community based learning courses at Beloit, and I returned to them again today after watching footage of 25000 Wisconsinites dressed in red and black. A sea of bodies and voices crowding in and around the Capitol Rotunda in Madison, their demonstrations were aimed at addressing the passage of a budget that will deny most state employees collective bargaining rights.   

“This place is crazy right now,” my cousin Ryan told me on the phone from his chemistry lab at UW Madison, “You’d never believe it.”

For every state employee who attended the manifestation asking for his or perspective to be heard, there were university students and families, public defenders and educators from non-public institutions, children, retirees and activists standing alongside.   Each and every one of them assumed the role as a public servant . . . as did the smaller numbers those who stood on the other side of the ideological line, calling for the budget to be passed.  The beautiful, anonymous manifestation of direct democracy by people who dissipate back to their homes and lives, like a faint fragrance in the air, once the labor of standing and being counted is done. 

Both the photo and Alice Walker’s  poem are instructive on days like today; they communicate an ethos of service which assumes that responsibility is bound to flexibility, agency is bound to acts of mindfulness, and leadership is fostered, nurtured, and sustained, through largely anonymous acts.    

“Do something small, beautifully,” I tell students in my needs assessment and grant writing courses . . . and they do.  They have developed beautifully rendered  materials which have become tools within various non-profit organizations’ outreach.  No matter what the project, the students commit themselves to a painstaking design, development and editing process when it is done well . . . and it often is.

They become better writers through the process — we all do in fact — but they develop a more integrated sense of what it means to be a public servant as well.  It demands flexibility and creative problem solving when personal or organizational objectives are not coupled with means; it demands mindfulness and intentionality in all acts of communication, and it demands that we recognize that sometimes, actually often, leadership is an anonymous enterprise, as it will have been for those people who raised their voices in Tahir Square in Cairo two weeks ago, in Bahrain yesterday, on Capital Square in Madison Wisconsin today.