The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

by Samantha Power

governments can either do harm or do good. “What we do,” he would say, “depends on one thing: the people.” Institutions, big and small, were made up of people. People had values, and people made choices.

“If I think everyone else will be better than me, then you’re right, I shouldn’t try. But if that is my approach, maybe I should just preemptively admit defeat and retire now.”

The scenes reminded me of a Macedonian satirist’s brilliant summation of the ethos behind the killing: “Why should I be a minority in your state when you can be a minority in mine?”

“If you run, you hit the bullet; if you walk, the bullet hits you.”

As Mother Teresa famously said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

An identifiable American life would almost always be more galvanizing than thousands of faceless foreigners in a faraway country.

For example, when is military force justified? How do the moral and religious traditions of nonviolence coexist with the moral imperative not to stand idly by in the face of suffering? How does one (particularly one who lacks sufficient information) measure the risks of action and inaction before deciding what to do? What would it mean if any country could take upon itself the decision to use force without any rules? Who should write these rules?

I noted that very few of us were likely to find ourselves the victims or perpetrators of genocide. But every day, almost all of us find ourselves weighing whether we can or should do something to help others. We decide, on issues large and small, whether we will be bystanders or upstanders.

“I have learned,” Obama told me, “that if you are truthful, people respond, even if they don’t agree with you. We have to find our truth and not be afraid to be straight with people.”

I was reminded of President Johnson’s famous observation that a leader’s problem was not in “doing what’s right, but knowing what’s right.”

“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”

Michael Jordan, who once said, “When the game gets close and something big is on the line, it all slows down, and I see things better.”

“Never compare your insides to somebody else’s outsides.”

“Feel the fear and do it anyway,” he told me.

he preferred optimism because “as a pessimist, you suffer twice.”

“Feel the fear and do it anyway,”

Being a public servant requires making decisions every day—decisions that can have unintended outcomes, even life or death consequences.

So much of what happens is beyond our control. Yet how we use the time we have is within our control.

I never wanted to fall into the trap of “admiring the problem.”

“It’s not inputs that matter,” I would hear in my head. “It’s outcomes.”

People who care, act, and refuse to give up may not change the world, but they can change many individual worlds.