What is your power for as a public official? It is not your personal property which you can exercise as you wish to accomplish self-serving agenda. The self-serving agenda can be your own, or those of your family and friends. These are agenda that should take the backseat in the exercise of your power. Otherwise, power becomes an entitlement, which it should not be.
Power does not locate you higher than the people. The citizens are ultimately the ones in whom sovereignty resides. It does not position you in the higher echelon of society. It only makes you responsible for and accountable to public expectations of service. So do not demand or even wait for special treatment, or tributes, or public deference to you. You are not a god; you are a public servant.
Power was entrusted to you for you to enable the defenseless, powerless, marginalized, underserved, and oppressed to gain access to services that government is mandated to deliver. The government was born to regulate behavior so that no one class, person, or other entity will oppress another. You are not supposed to give more muscle to the powerful for them to trample upon the weak. You are supposed to exercise your power to empower the weak for them to be able to parry abuses of the oligarchs and other bullies in the schoolyard.
So consider getting off your high and mighty horse. On a horse, you can fall to the ground. The feel of the earth is way better with your feet on it, than flying and gliding above it. With your feet firmly planted on the ground, you will never fall.
This is the Republic of the Philippines, not Mt. Olympus.
