Public Service can be easily misconstrued, both by the public servant and the public. Essentially, public service is service to the public. It can be enacted in secret, or on a pedestal – it all depends on what the situation demands. It acts regardless of whether there will be plaudits or persecution from the public. It needs to be strong to endure the temptation of acting to seek public approval, and to be resolute when facing ingratitude for work done well. It is secret in the sacrifices one has to make, yet remains ever ready to offer them.
Good public service needs to be amply remunerated, so that the heart is not too distracted from having to feed one’s stomach. Yet at the same time, public service cannot be overly compensated, lest one’s intrinsic motivation to serve becomes undermined by transactionalism.
To the public eye, it is easy to mistake the heart for lifelong service for a life of servitude. The former is putting the interest of the public above oneself. The latter is succumbing to the deception that one must be a slave for the public. When one serves as a slave, the master is encouraged to be a tyrant. When one serves as a friend and as a fellow citizen who puts the interests of other citizens above oneself, that engenders true selflessness and inspires a like-minded civic consciousness in others. Hence, it takes as much civic mindedness in the public as well as in public servants to have a good public service.
The inherent tension of public service is that the better the service offered, the more complacent and demanding the public become. The irony is that this perpetuates the push towards servitude in public servants and emboldens the public towards tyranny. The situation becomes worse when political masters lord over the public servant as internal tyrants, or frame their obligations toward public service in terms of their tenure as political appointees. Good public service is also about teaching the public how to behave well, starting with public servants and politicians behaving well as members of the public and members of the public responding well with civic-mindedness.
Even in the best of times, the public servant will eventually falter, fade and fail. The need to strengthen one’s heart for public service is not the same as the urge to steel one’s heart against servitude. Yet, oftentimes, it feels the same. The earnest public servant can become jaded, tired, burnt out. Loved ones can become neglected. Time that should have been used in caring for one’s own is offered up in sacrifice for a greater cause, only for one to realize that in not taking care of one’s own hearth, families of the nation eventually suffer as well.
Systems in public service sometimes stifle the personal connection that is so needed to ensure a human touch. Efficiency becomes the new rod that hardens the public servant from that heart-to-heart connection. For to be a good public servant, one must guard one’s heart to keep it pliable and responsive to the hurts, hopes and happiness of those whom one professes to serve.
I believe the best public servant should never be huddled behind desks or offices. The occasional huddle is alright I suppose, but too much of “going to office” as opposed to “getting down to work” is anathema. Bureaucratic processes that enslave the public servant to the desk, and demands that the public conforms to the same, should be carefully reviewed. Long paper trails have been justified in the name of due process, transparency and accountability. Try explaining that to someone in real need. At their point of need, we erect bureaucratic walls, as if they were the Huns instead of the hungry, as if they were Neanderthals rather than the needy. The widowed, the single parent, the dutiful son or daughter trying to bury their recently departed…..we often demand that they enter our bureaucratic world on our terms when we should be entering theirs to see how we can be of help.
Hence, the place of the public servant should be in the streets and rural roads, in the homes of people whose nameless plights must come to light. For only by pounding the streets can one’s heart beat in resonance with the needs of the land. For the true heart of public service will never be felt even in the most brilliant of policy papers without that first connection through a shared tear.
