Monthly Archives: September 2010

“The Hard Work of Compassion” – TNC

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I read something today that was among the most remarkable pieces of writing I’ve ever read.  It’s by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who writes a blog for The Atlantic.  Coates, who is African-American, has been doing a lot of reading and blogging about the Civil War.  In the post that struck me, he was writing about Drew Gilpin Faust’s Mothers of Invention, a history of women in slaveholding families during the Civil War. It leads to a meditation on what it takes for him to understand such women, and why:

To answer such a question, it is not enough to understand cause of the Civil War. A debate over the meaning of the Confederate Flag is almost beside the point. You have to remove the cloak of the partisan, and assume the garb of the thespian. Instead of  prosecuting the Confederate perspective, you have to interrogate it, and ultimately assume it. In no small measure, to understand them, you must become them. For me to seriously consider the words of the slave-holder, which is to say the mind of the slave-holder, for me to see them as human beings, as full and as complicated as anyone else I know, a strange transcendence is requested. I am losing my earned, righteous skin. I know that beef is our birthright, that all our grievance is just.  But for want of seeing more, I am compelled to let it go.

More than any other book, Mothers has confronted me with the hard work of compassion.

…

In this society, we view compassion as a favor, something along the lines of forgiveness extended to the humble and deserving. No. My compassion is utterly selfish, and is rooted in a craving for power. It is compelled by my curiosity, itself, just another name for hunger, for desire, for want of the great power of knowing. It is not enough for me to sit around scoring morality points on dead people, all the while blind to the living morality of this troubled time. There’s no power in that. I need to know more.

Those paragraphs just totally kicked my ass.  “The hard work of compassion.”  A compassion that is not charity, but that also does not excuse.  Does not draw its eyebrows together and go “awww.”  That rolls up its sleeves and says, you can understand this but it won’t be fun.

Reading this, I thought of a couple of recent reviews I’ve read of Breaking Night:  A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard.  The title is pretty self-explanatory, but the reviews both* made clear that, while the author’s childhood was rendered almost unimaginably awful by her parents’ drug addictions, she has deep compassion and love for these flawed people.

As I sat there feeling stunned that an African-American can undertake the work of compassion toward Confederate women and a former cocaine baby can write compassionately about her mother, it dawned on me that it was Yom Kippur,** and appropriate to repent, or start the process of repenting, or start thinking about what a really good idea it would be to repent, of the many areas of my life in which I am too lazy for the hard work of compassion.  And after all the repenting, it’s time to get off my ass and get to the hard work.

*****

* OK OK the other review was in People Magazine.  I’m traveling this week, so I’m fully caught up on celebrity news, fashions, and – um – books.

** I’m half Jewish and a half-assed Jew.  It’s the closest generally acceptable label for my heritage and religious views, though still off by a considerable distance.  Fair warning:  there’s probably going to be future blog post about all that.

Update:  TNC is also the genesis of the “drinking with white people” concept which I found so evocative.  Also updated to correct an embarrassing error in punctuation.  Not telling.

Bruce’s Blog

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You know how younger siblings are always complaining how they live in the shadow of their smarter, prettier, more popular older sibling?  Didn’t work that way in our family.

I was two years ahead of Bruce in school, and while I was a total and complete nerd, my nerdiness was focused on math and languages.  I didn’t really care about the rest, and had an attitude problem big enough to slack off where I didn’t care.  I especially hated gym,* but was also a very indifferent student in various science and social studies classes.  Bruce, on the other hand, excelled in all of his classes and was popular and athletic to boot.  Some of my most exciting high school memories are of hanging out at home on a Friday as Bruce headed out for an evening filled with the wholesome and educational things a group of 15-year-old boys did in 1977.

Now we’re all grown up, living in different cities, working in different professions, and holding diametrically opposed political views, so this whole being-outshone-by-your-younger-sibling thing should be far in our past, right.  Not hardly!  Put aside the fact that he ended up with both a Ph.D** and an MBA.  Put aside the fact that he had actually tried a case in court*** before I had emerged from junior associate document review hell.  He’s BLOGGING now!  And dammit he’s hilarious!

So if you get tired of the liberal claptrap and dog photos on this blog, head on over to Bruce’s Blog (til I come up with a catchier name).

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*  It was bad enough during things like basketball, where being the youngest, smallest, scrawniest kid in the grade was sort of a disadvantage, but I simply hated swimming.  Loathed it.  This may have been due to the fact that the class always ended up standing in some part of the pool where the water was over my head.  But I’ve always hated swimming, and hate it to this day.  My view is:  the evolution from gills to lungs was a good one, and we should enjoy ourselves up here on dry land.

** Hey, I’m a doctor too!  A JURIS doctor!!

** Small claims court vs. the limo driver from his wedding.  Complete with exhibits showing the fact that the driver’s route included a non-existent road.  He won.

“Not pretty . . .”: a follow up

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I’ve gotten some feedback on the former post that I should name the stylist or at least the salon.  After thinking about it, I’ve concluded that that makes sense.  God knows I don’t have the readership to affect his business, but I don’t think he gets to make statements like that anonymously.

It was a guy named Marvin at the Matthew Morris salon.*

If I had had my wits about me — and the ability to freeze time for 18 hours while I composed my response — this is what I would have said to Marvin instead of just waving my civil rights lawyer cred at him.

Marvin, I wish I’d said, I’m guessing you said that because the people in the group home make you uncomfortable.  It’s very clear — since you told me this — that the recovering alcoholics scare you, and make you concerned that the fears of any family to whom you might want to sell your gorgeous house would drive down the sales price.  As you thought those things through, and came to conclusions about how you viewed the developmentally disabled and recovering people who wanted to live in your neighborhood, did you ever stop to think that discomfort and fear are exactly precisely what cause many people to discriminate against gay men and lesbians?  Change the setting and characters, and we can both easily imagine a group of homeowners in a conservative community talking about their gay neighbors in exactly the tones and words you used.

Don’t just “take them food at Christmas.”  Knock on the door.  Introduce yourself.  Get to know your neighbors.  Try to include them in your community as you would hope gay men and lesbians would be included in any community in which they chose to live.

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* One of the reasons I hesitated to name the salon was because its owner just won some sort of reality show contest.  Don’t know which way that cuts.  (Sorry!).

“Not Pretty…But Harmless”

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Subtitle:  Drinking with white people, part deux.  Went to a new hairdresser today.  Turns out — I know this will come as a shock — he’s gay. [**] Within the first few minutes of our conversation, I learned that he had a husband to whom he’d gotten married in Vegas.  Awesome!  I’m a huge fan of marriage equality!  We had a grand ol time discussing the California Prop 8 case, how cool it was that he got married, what it was like to work with your husband (something we had in common), the comparative virtues of Lady Gaga’s meat outfit vs. Bjork’s swan outfit, and his penchant for (another surprise!) decorating.  Little did I know, my drinking-with-white-people experience had begun.  I learned about his fantastic historic house, in his fantastic historic neighborhood right downtown, where he and his husband could walk to many incredible restaurants.

But!  They were going to turn the historic property across the street into a 40 bed alcohol rehab facility!  Luckily he and his neighbors got together and raised hell, so they rejected it.  (Still not clear who the “theys” were.)  I weighed the pros and cons of explaining the Fair Housing Act and NIMBYism* at this point, but honestly I really liked the haircut and … well this is the sort of compromises you make when you really like the haircut but the stylist is an asshole.

Then it got worse.  Of course, he said, there are already two of them in the neighborhood.  Two facilities.  One is for, you know, mentally challenged people.

“You know, not pretty… but harmless.”

At this point, thank God, he was through cutting and was putting some sort of styling glop in my hair.  I rubbed my eyes and explained that I was a civil rights lawyer, that we did fair housing cases, and that all of these people and facilities had just as much right as he and his husband did to live there.  Of course, he sighed, you know we take them food at Christmas.

I guess I’m especially bummed because I’m guessing this guy has been on the receiving end of prejudice in his life but still could not see past his own prejudices.  This is, of course, not uncommon, but every damn time it depresses the hell out of me.

And I really did like the haircut.

Update:  I guess I should be clear on what was implicit in the last sentence.  NFW am I going back to that stylist or salon.  Oh well.

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*Not In My BackYard.

** Update:  A friend quite properly pointed out that this sentence itself — in its attempt at humor — is pretty stereotyped, like saying “I know this will come as a shock” that my banker is Jewish or an African-American is a good athlete.  All I can say is: yup.  I screwed that one up.  In the tradition of blogging (funny to have a tradition for something that has only about ten years of history), I’m not deleting it.  Rather in my own tradition, I’ll just go forward feeling stupid about it.

Dog seasons

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Snow!

Rolling in snow!

Dog park with snow.

Did I mention snow?

Rolling in mud thinly disguised as snow.

Dog park with lakes.

Shaking off lake water in the van.

Smelling like lake water for days.

Pooping in the tall grass.

Watching human searching for poop in the tall grass.

Basking in the sun.

Basking in the shade.

Supervising the grill.

Long walks.

“Cold” and “dark” increasingly used as human excuses to skip the morning run.

Poop hard to distinguish from grass when scooping in the dark.

Poop easier to distinguish on snow when scooping in the dark.

Thanksgiving clean-up.

Posing for holiday card.

Snow!

Civ Pro Gone Evil

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This week I’m being Carrie’s associate.  She gave me a fascinating topic to research:  Can the doctor who involuntarily sterilized her client, a woman with developmental disabilities, argue that the statute he violated is unconstitutional because it infringes the privacy rights of … women with developmental disabilities.  I believe this is covered by the con law doctrine of chutzpah.

Anyway, in researching this, I have had more WTF moments than in most projects.   For example, I came across these two stunning examples of Civ Pro Gone Evil and thought I’d share.  (Squibs are from Westlaw; don’t blame me for the retro language.)

Lake v. Arnold, 232 F.3d 360 (3d Cir. 2000): Mentally retarded woman’s Pennsylvania claims challenging allegedly nonconsensual sterilization accrued under Pennsylvania’s two-year statute of limitations for personal injury suits when she was sterilized in 1977, notwithstanding that she was 16 years old and mentally retarded when sterilization occurred, and that any suit that could have been brought at that time would have been brought by her father and step-mother, who had arranged for sterilization to be performed.

Stump v. Sparkman, 435 U.S. 349 (1978): Woman, who had been sterilized by order of Indiana circuit court when she was 15 years old, and her husband brought civil rights action against her mother, her mother’s attorney, the medical practitioners who performed the sterilization and judge who ordered it. … The Supreme Court, Mr. Justice White, held that: … (2) neither the procedural errors the judge may have committed nor the lack of a specific statute authorizing his approval of the petition in question rendered him liable in damages, and (3) because the judge who performed the type of act normally performed only by judges and because he did so in his capacity as a circuit court judge, the informality with which he proceeded did not render his action “nonjudicial” for purposes of depriving him of his absolute immunity.

*****

Update:  Susan Greene’s excellent column about the case here.

I’ve found my comrades: Right 2 Dry!

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In last week’s episode, I was hoping to start a movement around my random housekeeping activities.  Since I’m a neurotic middle-class white person, I urged the NYT Magazine to devote a trend article to my decision to hang up my laundry.  With binder clips.  Turns out:  it’s already a movement. And I totally love their logo:

I asked WordPress to make the image as large as possible, so you could all see the eagle-eyed eagle firmly grasping a clothesline full of undies.  Their site actually contains this sentence:  “Line-drying is patriotic.”   Comrades!

The reason it’s a movement is the source of deep regret for me, however.  Turns out many homeowners associations don’t permit line-drying, providing further evidence that HOAs are not only cleverly disguised agents of Satan, but unpatriotic to boot.*  My regret is that my laundry hangs incognito in my basement, without the ability to piss off anyone, much less an HOA.  Perhaps I should take photos of it and hang them up around my yard. . . .

*If I’m ever involved in litigation with an HOA and opposing counsel tries to admit this statement into evidence, remember:  it’s called “hyperbole.”  Even if it were admissible, it would only be admissible for the proposition that opposing counsel has no sense of humor.