Stories That are Mine to Tell

Joining the Foreign Service, or really any government position, occasionally feels like joining a really exclusive club. One where you occasionally get to do REALLY COOL THINGS, usually do very mundane things, and sometimes have to do not so great things because the law says so. But the reason that I call it an exclusive club is that even though we are doing the public's work, there's so much of what we do that we can't talk about in public. Things like the privacy act, HIPAA, classified stuff (usually not as "secret" as it sounds), and operations security make it difficult for us to talk about our jobs, whether we process claims for Medicare, or research cures for cancer, or negotiate labor deals, or find ourselves abroad interviewing people for visas to go to the U.S. This leads to a couple of interesting consequences. One: because we're often prohibited from broadcasting what we do at work without going through the "proper" channels, we tend to blog more about our personal lives, feelings, travels, etc.  Which, combined with the clearances for dissemination to the public being so slow leads to number 2: The public really, really doesn't get what we do.

Theoretically, it's really easy for people to put themselves in the shoes of one type of public worker, a soldier.  I don't want to get into how frequently off the media's depiction of what the modern military actually does, but suffice it to say that every American has had a pretty well-rounded exposure to what the military does, good and bad, through education curriculums (particularly history), movies and TV, publicity campaigns by the military branches themselves ("be all you can be" or your local military recruiter), and personal interactions. But other government branches don't always have the positive press nor the universal exposure that the military has. And it shows. 

 In modern times this has lead to an almost constant assault on public workers, at all levels. You don't have to look very far to see it, from the demonization of teacher's unions to the sequester. And so much of it is because politicians, in there infinite wisdom, choose to rabble-rouse rather than take a principled stand to support the good work that public servants do. Us in the bureaucracy, we make this very very easy, by becoming insular and taking the easy way out. Rather than tell our stories we stay silent, because it's to difficult to find the stories that are the stories that strike the balance between political and private. We don't take the time to distill the stories until they are general enough that they can become public. And because we are public servants, we try to stay out of those political battles (even though we definitely have an opinion).   So the public at large never hears the stories on the front lines of the immigration debate from the point of view of the consular officers making those life-changing decisions, because that would infringe upon privacy rights and put us in an advocacy role. Nor, unless we resign, does the public hear the rigorous debates about U.S. Foreign Policy as it applies to country X or Y that occur behind closed doors. 

Upon taking office every person who works for the government takes the following oath:

"I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter."

To me this means that I will always do my best to serve the people of the United States. And I will try to do the work that they are paying me to do with their best interests in mind. In the meantime I will seek out the stories that are mine to tell.