On a politician’s last day in office, someone takes the nameplate off the door. The successor will have a place to hang a coat by Monday. By the time the former officeholder gets home, the building is learning a new name.
The office is gone. The wreckage is still there.
At Mount Doom, Gollum reaches for the ring with fire beneath him. The whole mountain is coming apart, and he has eyes for one small thing. He calls it his precious. By then, you have to wonder what he would do with it if he got it back. Where would he go? Who would he tell? What would count as a good day if he already had the only thing he wanted?
Political power can narrow a person’s world like that. Early on, you take a call because somebody needs help. Years later, you take the call because you want to know who’s asking, who else knows, and how the answer might play. Somewhere in between, a neighbor starts to look like a vote, a colleague like a favor owed, and a disagreement at the dinner table like a challenge to your authority.
A public office gives you real work to do. Sometimes you can get somebody an answer after months of being passed from desk to desk. Sometimes you can vote for a measure that helps people who will never know you had a hand in it. Those are good uses of power. They also ask something of you when the people you serve have no money to give, no influence to lend, and no reason to thank you in public.
That’s when a constituent finds out whether you meant what you said at the fish fry. They remember how long it took you to call back. They remember whether you spoke up when the easy thing was to look down at the papers in front of you. The campaign photograph may be on your wall for another thirty years. The person in it may remember the day entirely differently.
Your children keep a record of their own. They remember the subjects that made the room go quiet. They remember who had to apologize first and who could walk out without explaining himself. They remember how you acted when they disagreed with you and still needed you to be their father. Years later, a child can forget what started an argument and still remember the exact sound of your keys hitting the kitchen counter.
You can put off a hard conversation for one more vote, one more fundraiser, one more election. There’s always something on the calendar that somebody assures you is urgent. Then the calendar clears, and the people you kept asking to wait have stopped asking. You have all evening now. You could have used an evening like that ten years ago.
A person can spend decades around people who laugh a little too quickly at his jokes. It takes some getting used to when the room laughs only if the joke is funny. The same goes for advice. When you’re useful, people will find gentle ways to tell you that you’re right. Afterward, if you’re lucky, somebody who knew you before the first campaign will tell you what they were trying to say all along.
The temptation is to reach for the ring again. Find another title, another committee, another room where the chair at the head of the table stays empty until you arrive. Gollum would understand. There’s a certain comfort in knowing exactly what you want, particularly when wanting it takes up the time you might otherwise spend asking who paid for it.
What stays when political power leaves? People remember who you were when push came to shove. You have a say in what they remember about the years that come next. You can pick up the phone and listen through the part where you want to interrupt. You can name what you swept under the rug. You can show up for somebody whose name you’ll never need on a donor list. If the person you hurt wants some distance, you can honor that and still do the work of changing.
There’s a particular kind of freedom in waking up with no vote to count and no statement to issue. You can say what you should have said years ago in the plain words you’d use across a kitchen table. You can help somebody and let them go home without owing you anything. You can keep a promise that costs you a Saturday and earns you no applause.
Be the person you said you were, especially when the power’s gone.
“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” — Mark 8:36 (KJV)
— JC
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