Friday ponderings

Freshman year of college I took a turn way into a left field of hippy activist types. I feel like people who meet me now would find it unlikely that I used to have long heated arguments about whether community service or advocacy is more important; that I met my husband in the Progressive Student Labor Movement (he doesn't really seem like much of an activist either); that I used to march chanting "Si Se Puede" (okay, fine, I kind of hated chanting) during a living wage campaign alliteratively titled "Justice for Janitors."

Horrible as it sounds, I've long since lost my energy for tackling the world's ills. While what I do now is titled "public service" by some, I still have some issues with that. I feel like my conception of service didn't--and doesn't--have national boundaries. And yet people want to call me a public servant, and I serve my country, but that means I don't serve everyone. So sometimes I feel uncomfortable with people I know from my old life who are working in inner-city clinics or organizing migrant farm workers or something like that. Because I am doing this, and we both know it's not the same.

I think the way I think about it, though, when I wonder if this matters in any larger sense, is that I have a chance, over the course of my career, to shape positively America's role in the world. And it is the truth that what the U.S. does reverberates broadly. Maybe I have the chance to make a big difference. Maybe I don't. Sometimes in the Foreign Service having a real impact seems like a matter of being in the right place at the right time. But I guess I'll take that chance because it's a pretty cool thing to even have a chance at doing.

And I wasn't any good at chanting anyway, alas.