“Somebody once wrote: ‘Hell is the impossibility of reason.’ That’s what this place feels like. Hell.”

Friends:

I have always had the belief that, if absolutely necessary, I could do anything, that self-preservation was my strongest attribute.  I just always have had that sense that when push came to shove, I would be able to do it.  Physically, mentally, emotionally, put me to the test and if my life, if my safety, was in the balance, I would succeed.  But over the weekend I came to realize that this belief, while fairly intense, has never really been tested.  Yet there are people amongst us, who we pass on the street every day, who have not only been tested in ways that we may never be able to comprehend, but who have actually risen to the occasion and killed it—literally.

I started a book a few days ago about the Vietnam War that has been widely hailed because of its realism and grit, a book that drops the reader right into the jungle with a company of Marines, directly into the “heart of darkness.”  Although a fictionalized account of a tour of duty in the “bush,” it was written by someone actually there, drawing from his personal experiences to illustrate the horrors of that war against Communism.  The leaches, the tigers, the jungle itself trying to seek out ways to kill the soldiers, separate and apart from the enemy with their ambushes and booby-traps, offer a test of wills the likes of which I could never fathom.

In one particular scene in the book the Marines have been walking for days, their food all consumed, their hands and feet all blistered and oozing of pus, each of them suffering from digestive problems, and yet still they walk, walk, walk, for no reason that they can understand.  Six days, then seven days they walk, without food, fighting the terrain, the jungle, the elements, exhaustion… at some point the thought of death had to have been preferable to continuing to walk with no apparent end in sight.  The days dragging endlessly on, each day potentially the last.  And yet the drive to continue on, to persevere, to not let the jungle, the enemy, or their own leadership beat them kept them going to make it back home.  Self-preservation can drive people to super-human heights, making merely mortal people into heroes.

Yesterday I participated in the Susan G. Komen walk for breast cancer, just me and 15,000 other people trying to eradicate this horrible disease.  Amongst those 15,000 participants were the survivors, those who fought their cancer and kicked its ass.  You want to talk about the fight of your life, the body trying to kill itself, a cure unproven, treatments successful for some and useless for others…?  Can anyone really be tested more than that?

But missing amongst the 15,000 walking yesterday were those who didn’t succeed, who didn’t beat their disease.  The people whose images and names were relegated to posters, T-shirts, and signs, the people in whose memory their families continue to walk and fight, so that others don’t have to go through what their loved ones did.  It wasn’t because they didn’t have the killer instinct; it wasn’t because they gave up or didn’t have that extra amount of self-preservation.  There are some battles that simply cannot be won no matter the effort, the drive, or the determination.  Which is perhaps the most frightening aspect of life…

As I think about how much I value my life and how hard I would fight to sustain it, I realize that not only have I never been tested, but that I have no concept of how difficult that fight can actually be.  When I think about pushing my body and my mind to its limits in an effort of self-preservation, it’s with the idea that success is a given, that I cannot fail.  Yet sometimes, no matter the effort or willpower, it may not be enough.

So what to do with that realization?  Is that reason enough to not fight?  The idea that no matter how hard you fight, how deeply you need, want, desire to succeed, that the forces against you may be so great that you cannot win?  That the disease inside of you has a different agenda than defeat, that a stray bullet may catch you after the cease-fire, or that you may simply slip off a mountainside when humping to the next landing zone?  Do you simply chuck it and take what life has to give you?

NO!  No, you don’t.  You look to the ones who did win; you walk with the survivors, you see their smiles, you celebrate the veterans and you salute their sacrifice.  You look to them as the examples, the paragons of dignity and you say that you can do it too, that you can fight the good fight and you can win…  That heroes do exist and they walk amongst us, mere mortals who have accomplished something remarkable.

And that is all that anyone can ask of themselves.  That is all that I would ask of myself.  I hope to never be in that type of situation, but if I were, why wouldn’t I give it all I’ve got? 

“I’m not a coward, I’ve just never been tested.  I’d like to think that if I was I would pass.”

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“What about the old American social custom of self-defense? If the police don’t defense us, maybe we ought to do it ourselves.”

Friends:

I have been having a dilemma with respect to one of the “heroes” of fiction I have been reading about lately.  As you know, amongst my top 10 books last year was a book by Lee Child involving the character Jack Reacher.  Reacher has appeared in 17 novels and I am slowly making my way through them based upon the suggestion of a good friend of mine.  I am 9 novels into the series, just past halfway, and while I am enjoying them immensely, I am struggling with Reacher as the hero.

The allure of a character like Reacher is his nomadic lifestyle; a former Military Policeman who left the army on good terms and has since then basically walked the earth a la “Kung Fu,” helping those in need and using his mind and military training to save the day.  I think that we all would love to be able to travel from place to place with a toothbrush and some money, buying clothes for a few days and disposing of them when time to buy new, helping damsels in distress, finding trouble when we aren’t looking for it, but having the confidence to know that the good guys will win because we are involved. 

And with all of that, there is a humanity to Reacher that is appealing, his focus on justice, his fight for the little guy, his sensitivity to the helpless.  All of these are commendable attributes that make him a hero to root for, to passionately follow down every foxhole; the kind of guy you would want right in front of you when walking into a dark alley.

The reason I read is pure escapism, the power to be anyplace and anyone.  The chance to vicariously live through the bulletproof specimen of a 6’5” super-man takes me out of my 5’9” body and transports me to the level of the invincible.  Reacher is not only a hero with brawn and power, but he is an intellect who uses his mind just as much as his fists.  He is proof that you must use your mind to think through the problem or else your fists will fail you.  One might call him a Sherlock Holmes for 21^st century, if Holmes had been 250 pounds and was a master marksman from 1000 yards away.  And as you know, I am huge fan of Master Holmes…

But unlike Holmes, who always caught the bad guy and turned him over to Inspector Lestrade, Reacher deviates from Holmes sometimes in a brutal and hard to swallow way:  Reacher is not above practicing vigilante justice.  While I am sure all of us would love to exact our own form of retribution without concern for laws, would any of us actually do so if we had the freedom?

In one of the novels, Reacher infiltrates a potential criminal family, going undercover as a henchman to get to the bottom of a criminal enterprise.  When he learns the truth, and the bad guys learn the truth about him, the action takes off with a shootout at the bad guy’s mansion and many attempts on Reacher’s life.  Yet Reacher manages to escape and notifies the law that the cavalry can storm the mansion.  But just when you think he is going to ride off into the sunset as always… he goes back to the mansion and takes matters into his own hands, killing the bad guy in cold blood and then vanishing.

For some reason, this just doesn’t sit well with me.  Call me old fashioned, say I am a purist for law and order (even though I have no delusions that it always works), but taking the law into his own hands and acting as judge, jury and executioner is upsetting to me.  I have read many books and certainly those in which the hero ends up killing the bad guy; but in so many of those situations it feels to the reader as if the hero was justified in doing so—the killing was part of a large scale effort, some “heat of passion” or “self defense” scenario.

But with Reacher that is not always the case.  In another book, after Reacher has solved the mystery and the bad guys have been dealt with, Reacher discovers an accomplice to the crime and summarily disposes of him in the kitchen of his own home (even though the bad guy was an officer in the military).

Look, I’m not saying that I am not going to continue to read the novels, far from it.  The stories are intriguing, the mysteries are multi-layered and Reacher is certainly a character who men want to be and women want to be with.  But I feel a loss of innocence when Reacher has to resort to his own brand of justice to get just that.

HA!  Would you believe that I just figured out why this bothers me so much?  I am not kidding, while writing this I just had the epiphany as to why Reacher’s vigilante actions sometimes bother me:  it is the feeling that only through vigilante acts can justice truly be accomplished.  That’s what rankles me about it!  As an attorney, and maybe even as a human being with what I would like to think are strong morals, it bothers me because I do not believe that justice may only be accomplished by taking matters into your own hands.  Call me a boy scout, but I still believe that the police get the right man, that justice will prevail, and that good will win out over bad.

Whew, glad to finally have that mystery solved… Now on to the next Reacher!

“Jeremy spoke in class today.”

Friends:

 

It seems lately that there is a new wave of violence in our schools, what with the recent shootings in Ohio, Tennessee, Washington, and Arizona.  And the year is only two months old!  While I won’t go to the length of calling these events an “epidemic,” it certainly shows that the times are changing even from when I was in school, which doesn’t seem to have been that long ago.  But where for me it would have been foreign to think of kids bringing guns to school, unfortunately my kids will have to adopt a more vigilant and suspicious mindset when going to what should be the safest place in the world, the school room.

With terrorism on the news every night, violence in the schools, increasing population and poverty, and an apparently out-of-control government, it certainly looks as if the eras of our predecessors were so much better than we have it today.  Sure we have the iPad and TiVo and laptops and George Clooney, but are we really better off than those who walked these same streets 50 years ago, 100 years ago, or even further back than that?

We have a tendency to look back with whimsy and fondness on the times of the past, romanticizing the era and maybe even wishing we could go back to a simpler, freer time.  For me, the particular era in time is right at the end of the 19^th century known as the Victorian Era in England and the Gilded Age in America.

Yes, those were perfect times.  Everyone dressed so smartly, with ties and tails and top hats, going to balls and dining at the club, smoking a cigar and drinking a scotch, high tea, perusing the newspapers and opining on politics.  Catching a hansom cab for a ride through Hyde Park, taking in the theater, and speaking in the Queen’s English, which always sounds so darn polite! 

Ahh, the Victorian Age, when skyscrapers did not blight the architecture, when the smog and fumes came from factories and not from cars, and when everybody treated everybody else with dignity and respect- and more importantly, a time in which crime and violence were virtually unheard of.

Gosh, weren’t things so much better then?  The time of Dickens and Sherlock Holmes and myriad others whose sole passion was literature and the creative arts.  I think of those times and I can picture myself settled right in the middle, with top hat and tails, walking stick in my hand.  Can you picture it?  It’s… perfect.  No worries about violence in schools or international conflicts (consider that World War I was still over 20 years away), the only concerns being of happiness and joie de vivre.

But then I come back to Earth from my pie in the sky fantasy.  In the Victorian Age, medicine was still in its infancy, surgery was quite primitive, and education was unpredictable.  The class system was in full force—you were either upper class or you were… what?  Relegated to the working class, the manual laborers, the street-sweepers and the barkeeps?  And where would I have fit in?  Would I have been a successful attorney, the same as I am now?  Or would I have been a struggling writer, running for stories to sell to the newspapers while I work on the great novel that may never be published?  Or would it have been worse for me?  A black cloud above my head, debts putting me in prison, and a family going hungry?

It seems that to romanticize the past is to short-change the present.  Despite all of the struggles of the world, the frightening people and uncertain future, I still come back to this being the gilded age; this is the best time to be alive.  Because our present is what we make of it and we have the power to make it great.  The past has already happened and its history has already been recorded, but tomorrow is the blank slate.  Tomorrow is the story that has not yet been told and we, each and every one of us, is the author of our own history.

Pretty darn exciting time to be alive, right?

“Hate him! How could I hate him? Mothers don’t hate their sons! Is that what he told you?”

Friends:

There are many attorneys who not only put on their business cards that they are attorneys, but that they are counselors as well.  You may be intrigued to find out that counseling, while a fundamental aspect of our profession, is not taught in law school.  Yet we as attorneys are expected to do just that, provide counsel.  In some areas of practice, counseling is perhaps more valuable than actual legal acumen.

As many of you know, a large portion of my practice is in the area of probate and trust litigation and typically involves siblings fighting with each other.  While the rules of the battle require that the remedy be monetary, in many circumstances the fight is over affection.  You certainly see people at their absolute worst when they couple the fight over love with demands for money—as if money will fill the hole left vacant by a lack of affection.

It is because of my daily involvement in these types of matters that my scholarship has turned to matters affecting dysfunctional families.  Though my scholarship has not resulted in the purchase of lofty tomes on family dynamics and psychology—that would be too simple.  Instead, I have turned to the fictional word of dysfunction and have done a fair amount of reading lately about turmoil and the disintegration of the family unit.  Two books in particular lately have been fairly informative on the topic.  And would you believe that I have solved the problem of the dysfunctional family?  Ok, maybe not.

The first book is entitled “This Beautiful Life” and it deal with a family decomposing in the face of a social trauma.  When their 14 year old son forwards a sexually suggestive video sent to him by a female classmate to a friend of his which within hours goes viral, the family, under the pressure of social stigma and the uncertainty of the son’s educational future the family completely shatters to the point of irreparability. 

The second book is called “The Last Child” and deals with the destruction of a family when one of the children (the 13-year old protagonist’s twin sister) is kidnapped.  The events of the story take place a year after the incident, with the protagonist still searching for his sister in the hopes that she is somehow still alive.

When I was younger, I would watch television shows like St. Elsewhere and ER and wonder why people enjoyed watching television shows which were steeped so heavily in death, sadness, and depression. Sure, the doctors would sometimes succeed in saving the patient, but the real drama, the real attraction to the show was the ability to be a fly on the wall as we witnessed another person’s torment and misery.  And I was confounded as to why people would invest themselves emotionally in the plights of others and would internalize the pain of these characters.

So you can imagine my surprise when I search out these same scenarios—except I call it academia.  Cute, huh?

You see, I am convinced that a large cross-section of the dysfunction in families can be attributed to one factor—a lack of communication.  People are afraid to bear their souls, to get treatment to help them with their demons, and to seek out their own family for help, the very people on whom they should be able to rely.  In the first book I mentioned, the story was told from the perspective of each of the three family members, mom, dad and son.  Each one of them bore their strife alone, refusing to seek help or even discuss their struggles with each other.  And because of this, the family unit frayed to irreparability. 

In the second book, the family unit was torn asunder because of the guilt a father placed on himself for his little girl’s abduction and a mother’s inability to release him from such pain.  The result?  A father who left and never returned, a mother who turned to drugs, and a son who tried to keep it together, while never giving up the search. 

Obviously the scenarios dramatized in the books were sensationalistic for the purpose of deriving readership, but I maintain that just as much can be learned from them as can be learned from the academic treatises and textbooks.  Pain, distress, and misery cannot be borne alone.  It is when these matters are not discussed, are not addressed as a unit, and are ignored by those who are trusted do they fester and lead to disrepair. 

Don’t believe me?  I heard this story from an opposing counsel who had heard it from a retired judge:  a daughter was so happy her mother was dead, that at the funeral she brought her CD player and played the song “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead” at its highest volume and then dumped a vial of her own urine into the burial plot.  Think that family could have communicated better? 

I can honestly say that the story seemed too impossible to be true… except for the fact that I represented the daughter.

If I am expected to counsel clients as well as give legal advice, I need to understand what leads to the dysfunction.  A failure to communicate is as good a start as any.