07/04/2022
Dear Friends, Family and Others,
I would like to inform you that I will no longer be handling people’s legal matters. While it was never my intention when I went to law school to ever become a lawyer, I am grateful for the experience. Now I have reached a place of cognitive dissonance. My heart’s desire has always been to make the world better for everyone. I love what the rule of law brings into spaces but being a licensed attorney in the USA means upholding a system which maintains inequity and injustice. There are those that believe people like myself should stay to fight for those who cannot fight for themselves. However, here are a few lessons I’ve learned along the way:
1. Most people come to me not seeking justice but want to leverage myself or the laws to benefit themselves.
2. The system is balanced out by those who are fighting to maximize outcomes for individuals in power and those who fight for the powerless. The law is symbolized by scales for a reason. But the thing is, fundamentally, nothing is actual changing. Individuals get little wins while society as a whole remains inequitable. An adversarial system for justice is a kingdom divided against itself.
3. As a nation, we, whichever identity category you choose, do not truly want a “better world”. We want things to be better for ourselves and we don’t want to feel bad about what we perceive makes our lives better. We are okay with poverty so long as we are not poor. We are okay with the criminal justice system so long as we are unaware of how we benefit from its existence. We are not looking for a non-zero-sum game but rather a zero sum game.
4. The legal system itself is so inextricably intertwined with the inequities that exist such that even being a lawyer trying to do good in the system means my good may inadvertently cause collateral damage elsewhere that I could not anticipate.
5. The critical mass that’s necessary to change the system is equally invested in the system not changing.
I keep having health issues which has lead me to ask myself some hard questions. This resulted in me concluding that I cannot continue to participate. Seeing what I see, knowing what I know, I am finally honestly admitting that I too am a part of the problem. My hope is that younger people will see what I see and choose to change it. I am not fatalistic and believing their is no hope for the future. I know there’s an answer. But I have to do my tiny part in making things better and I do that by discontinuing my participation in it. As a self-proclaimed social equity advocate, I realized that I have been putting donuts on cars with flat tires. But, my heart’s desire is to help design a non-environmental harmful car that cannot even get a flat tire.
I am not sure what my future will look like but I am committing to using my mind in ways that are not in conflict with my values. This is about me being true to who I am and my values, not a condemnation of the work of my profession.
