What Power Owes Us
Public authority carries an obligation to the people who must live with its decisions.
This week, my work took me through three different settings. I participated in a program for county middle managers, attended the Governor's Unified Readiness Summit with roughly a thousand leaders from across Virginia, and joined our Healthcare Coalition for a regional Hazard Vulnerability Assessment.
Different roles, different institutions, different kinds of expertise. Each gathering concerned some part of the same responsibility: how we organize ourselves to serve people, and how we prepare for things going wrong.
Management and preparedness can sound like administrative matters until we consider what they govern. Someone must decide which needs receive attention, which problems get passed along, and whether people have the means to do what we ask of them. Someone must recognize when an assumption about what help is available has stopped being true.
These are decisions about people's lives, even when they arrive as agendas, assessments, and workplans.
A hurricane brings that responsibility into focus. As Hurricane Isaias reached the Gulf Coast this week, the need for preparation became immediate. A person awaiting evacuation or medical care has little use for our organizational boundaries. They need those organizations to have worked out how to share resources and coordinate efforts.
That is what public power is for. Other events this week demand that we examine whether we still hold our leaders to that expectation.
Following Tennessee's failed September 30th execution of Christa Pike, the Pentagon announced plans to livestream the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, convicted of killing thirteen people at Fort Hood.
While victims and families deserve justice, and the public deserves an account of what the government does in its name, neither provides compelling answers for why a human death should become a broadcast spectacle.
The claim is that witnessing this is a deterrent to others who might commit similar attacks on social order. Evidence that withstands scrutiny of that justification is not apparent. It also does not release officials from responsibility for what they invite the public to participate in. Making a punishment an event for mass consumption is itself a decision about the relationship between the government and the governed. One which our culture has gravely criticized when it has been demonstrated by other countries and the authoritarian regimes that rule them.
The same obligation to consider the human consequences applies when government deploys force around civic life. In D.C., images of armed National Guard members near a ballot drop box prompted concern. Election officials requested limits on troops' placement near voting locations. The Guard said its personnel are directed not to monitor or secure polling places.
Nevertheless, their presence within the District, already a subject of much concern, controversy, and consternation, will inevitably have an adverse effect on the turnout and movement of people on their way to participate in the vote. By happenstance of lingering near a ballot drop-off while checking out a food truck on patrol, the work of interference is being done. It need not be directed by leadership and intentional by the Guard members: their presence writ large makes such occurrences inevitable, and the predictable perception of the public is likewise inevitable.
Spectacle and the manipulation of perception appear to guide the administration's decisions. Meanwhile, the work of leadership in public service must go on at the state and local level to prepare us for the next incident that will alter the lives of our residents.
Working in public service and governance does not relieve us of our obligations to utilize judgement about what should be done and apply deft skill in doing it. We must choose thoughtfully between the spectacle and the duty. Despite what those above us in the hierarchy of government power might pursue for ill-conceived ends, we must not grow accustomed to the burdens that it imposes on the people.
The obligation remains ours.
Stewardship begins with accepting that authority places other people's lives within the reach of our decisions. It requires us to ask whose safety we are protecting, whose dignity we are respecting, and whose voice we are open to hearing. Those questions apply to an emergency plan, a management decision, a deployment, and a sentence carried out in our name.
As we vote, we should demand leaders who can answer them. When officials claim a protective purpose, we should examine the consequences of their actions and expect correction when those actions undermine it. We should hold our institutions to that standard as well.
We spend considerable time preparing people to exercise public responsibility. The people at the top should have to meet their obligations, too.