The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Angus King, Jr. represents Maine in the U.S. Senate. This column is an excerpt from remarks shared by King at the Muskie School of Public Service’s graduation ceremony last Friday.
I want to share with you this morning some thoughts about public service. Public service is about helping people. It’s about serving people. And I think it’s in most of our DNA. It’s a human instinct to reach out to someone if they’re in trouble, if they need help, or if they need support of some kind.
That’s what public service is. And it goes back, you know, as far as we have recorded history. In the Bible, in Matthew 25:40-45, Jesus talks to some of his followers, and he says: “When I was hungry, you fed me. When I was sick, you treated me. When I was in prison, you visited me. When I was naked, you clothed me. When I was a stranger, you took me in.” And his followers said: “When did we do this? We don’t remember doing this for you.” And he said a very important thing, he said, “when you did this to the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”
In other words, the call is to service. The call is to serve other people and that’s really such an important part of what you’re doing. It doesn’t necessarily have to be government. It can be in a non-governmental organization, or a nonprofit in your community. You know, heading up the bake sale of church. In fact, prior to becoming governor, the highest political office in Maine I’d held was chair of the St. Paul’s Church Christmas fair.
But the point is, you can serve in many ways, you don’t have to be a general on a horse, or a president or a senator or a governor. Service is something that you can do every day for your neighbors and your community.
Most of you, many of you, are going to go out from here and do public service professionally. I’ll tell you a secret about public service. It’s a job, plus. What do I mean by that? Yes, it’s a job where hopefully you can make a living, but the plus is that you’re doing something important and worthwhile. I call it psychic income. You are changing the world. You are helping the world in a way that sometimes people won’t know, but it will really make a difference.
I’ve had three or four bouts of public service in my life. My first was with Pine Tree Legal Assistance in Skowhegan, and that was a tremendous learning experience. My public service at that time was to low-income people in Somerset County. When I came to Maine with Pine Tree Legal, Maine had debtors’ prison. We had people in jail in Maine because they couldn’t pay their bills and Pine Tree Legal Assistance brought a case, went to the Maine Supreme Court and had that declared unconstitutional. I can’t claim credit for that case, one of my colleagues brought it, but it changed people’s lives, and that’s what public service is all about.
Flash forward and you know of my time as governor and my time now as senator. But you know what? As I look back, I consider the most important achievement in my life in public service was not when I was in public office.
In 1987, along with Dick Barringer who used to teach here, a state senator named Pat McGowan, and a small group of other people, we created something called the Land for Maine’s Future program. It was a bond issue program to acquire and set aside public lands for our citizens so that they can be set aside forever. And I just looked it up six or eight months ago, this program has now set aside more than 600,000 acres in Maine in special places. That’s three times the size of Baxter State Park.
I consider that my probably my most important contribution to the state of Maine, because it’s going to be there forever. People who’ve never heard of me will be able to climb to the top of Mount Kineo or the Bold Coast in Cutler or Mount Agamenticus down in York County. That’s what I’m most proud of looking back at my service.
So public service is not only a job, as I said. Public service is a job, plus.
In the 1960s, I was in high school, and John F Kennedy was elected president. He made public service cool to a whole generation of Americans. I grew up in that era, in the civil rights movement. Bob Dylan, let’s see what was the line. “It was easy to tell wrong from right. It was just as easy to black from white.” I mean, that was a passionate moment.
I was at the March on Washington with Martin Luther King, Jr.. Well, maybe not exactly with him. But I took a day off from work and went to the march, and ended up standing trying to see at the Lincoln Memorial. Suddenly, a voice above me said, “Hey, man, you want a better view?” And I looked up as a young black guy in a tree reached down and pulled me up. I sat on the limb of that tree at the Lincoln Memorial, and heard the I Have a Dream speech, and that changed my life. And so I’ve been trying to serve ever since.
Bobby Kennedy was also a hero for me, and in the ‘60s, he was in South Africa, and he said something which has always stuck with me, about public service and change, and this is what I want to leave with you.
He said: “It is from numberless diverse acts of courage such as these that the belief that human history is thus shaped. Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of daring and energy, those ripples will build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
Each of us can stand up for an ideal, act to improve a lot of others, or strike out against injustice and send forth one of those ripples of hope — and I know that’s what you’re going to do.
