Am I the only one who’s over-the-top impressed with the impeachment witnesses?

This past week, I was on a plane during the exact times of the impeachment hearings, so I was able to watch almost every minute of them. The statements, the timelines, the tweets, and the procedural pontificating. It was quite a show.

But what impressed me most was not the steel nerves of Adam Schiff, or the intrepid interruptions from those pushing for parliamentary entry, or even the utterly composed demeanor of “the woman” who was ousted as Ukraine ambassador. What impressed me most was the fact that no one even knew who Marie Yovanovitch or any of these witnesses were, until the spotlight found them this week.

These are the people who – when we were all just trying to survive high school civics – were in the front row.

These are the people who, after fleeing dictator regimes, made their way to the top of a career that many of us hardly knew existed. These are the people who – after years of education and training – took an oath to “bear true faith and allegiance” to the Constitution, the same oath our first Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson took two centuries ago. These are the people we want running our country – the top 1% at West Point, the NDU and HKS grads, the scholars who daily enact the State Department’s 13 dimensions – in short, the front-row students.

Despite the chaotic, whiplash absurdity of the impeachment inquiry, the silver lining is a renewed respect and appreciation for those who do their work like it actually matters.

These officers have our best interests at heart and work hard, every day, to keep our borders secure. As David Brooks beautifully pointed out, these officers are at the heart of our democracy, and they care deeply about their work. They fight corruption and promote fairness and take real risks, all in the service of this great republic. All for us, actually – and I for one am grateful that the best among us seek to do this noble work.

I’m also reminded that we can do the same.

Although most of us never take an actual oath, integrity still guides our work. We still work hard to get it right. We have our clients’ best interests at heart, and we work hard every day to uphold our promise to do their work reliably, carefully, and honestly. Whether we are in the spotlight or simply scheduling a meeting, we can do the work as if it matters, as if someone were watching, as if our lives depended on it. We can do it, as the foreign service corps does, with “ uncompromising personal and professional integrity,” and “ownership of and responsibility for [our] actions and decisions.” While we aren’t all in the honorable and sometimes dangerous world of foreign service, we can all take a page from their notebook and face our work every day with veracity, devotion, and courage.

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Here’s more information about working in the foreign service corps. If you want to learn more about the impeachment inquiry, enter that rabbit hole here. And to find out how C&C works, contact us here.