HUMAN WEED

This morning, I parked my car in the public lot across from the Yale Bookstore, then began to walk across the street for a haircut. A black man, mid-thirties, sat on the pavement, ostensibly bothering no one, not blocking pedestrian traffic, just sitting quietly. A Yale University police officer ride pass on his bike, looks back, turns around, goes up to the sitting man, and begins to ask him questions. I hear the man say, 'I am just sitting for a moment.' I think no more about it, and continue on my way for my haircut.

Half-hour later, my hair freshly cut, I reverse by path. The man is still sitting on the sidewalk. The Yale University police officer--still on his bike--remains hovered over the man, only now joined by a New Haven Police officer whose squad car is doubled-parked. Despite knowing this would not end well for the man, I walked on.

It is said that one definition of a weed is 'any plant growing where you don't want it to grow.' The sitting man is, from the perspective of law enforcement, a mere weed. To be uprooted, removed, and discarded. For some, it is a crime, a public nuisance, simply to sit quietly on the pavement.

Yet, the greater crime this morning was a crime of omission. I, a lawyer and a law profession, did not stop, did not break stride, to inquire as to whether I could be of any assistance to the man. True, doing so would have taken time and, in all likelihood, may not have changed the outcome for the man. Still, what kind of lawyer am I, what can of law professor am I, when, by by ignoring the needs of a man simply sitting quietly on the pavement who is being harassed by the police, I too treat the man as a human weed? A morally suspect one, if not worse.

"YOU CAN"T SOLVE A PROBLEM FROM THE STATE OF MIND THAT CREATED THE PROBLEM." ALBERT EINSTEIN

Andrea Miller & the Editors of the Shambhala Sun, eds., All the Rage: Buddhist Wisdom on Anger and Acceptance (Boston & London: Shambhala, 2014) (From Christina Feldman, "Compassion for Those Who Cause Suffering": "In cultivating compassion you will be expected to encounter your fear of pain. You learn to be steadfast and still, understanding that the first building block of compassion is your simple willingness to keep showing up for all of life. That willingness teaches you that you won't be destroyed by your exposure to the difficult or unpleasant. You discover a genuine inner balance and sensitivity that can receive the difficult without being overwhelmed." Id. at 118, 126.).

CONFRONTING ADDICTION THROUGH SPIRITUALITY?

Chris Grosso, Indie Spiritualist: A No Bullshit Exploration of Spirituality, foreword by Noah Levine (New York: Atria,  2014) ("We're all asshole sometimes . . . The thing is, though, people are typically the biggest assholes toward themselves. . . . So why is it that so many of us feel unworthy of the very same love we so freely share with other people?? And why is it easier to show compassion to a complete stranger than to the person looking back art us in the mirror?" Id. at 45-46.).

Noah Levine, Refuge Recovery: A Buddhist Path to Recovering from Addiction (New York: HarperOne, 2014) ("The truth is, the experience of forgiveness is a momentary release. We don't and can't forgive forever. Instead, we forgive only for the present moment. This is both good news and bad. The good part is that you can stop judging yourself for your inability to completely and absolutely let go of resentments once and for all. We forgive in one moment and get resentful again in the next. It is not a failure to forgive; it is just a failure to understand impermanence. The bad news is that forgiveness is not something that will ever be done with; it is an ongoing aspect of our lives and it necessitates a vigilant practice of learning to let go and living in the present." Id. at 39. "One of the problems we face as addicts is that we get comfortable. Even though we don't always like the reality of our situation it becomes familiar." Id. at 93. "We also sometimes get lost in delusional philosophies that explain the difficulties of life. We like such philosophies because, being scared, we feel we have to have the right answer all the time. Many of the world's religious traditions are a direct reaction to the confusion and difficulty of life. It is difficult to rest in not knowing, so we create the delusion of knowledge. Humans devise creation myths, psychological theories, cultural norms, political beliefs, and religions, all in a vain attempt to appease or control their core feelings of insecurity and uncertainty. What Buddhism offers that differs from most other theories is a direct experience of what is true. Buddhism doesn't ask for blind faith or belief; it offers a practical path to walk. We cannot find freedom by thinking about it with an untrained mind. The untrained mind is not trustworthy, it is filled with greed, hatred, and delusion. Only the mind trained in mindfulness, friendliness, and investigation can directly experience the freedom from suffering that will satisfy the natural longing for security. This is the wisdom of insecurity." Id. at 93-94.).

POLITICAL OPPOSITION: WHERE HAVE ALL THE INTELLECTUALS GONE?

Eric Hobsbawn, Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: The New Press, 2014) (From "Politics and Culture in the New Century": "[T]he natural sciences must operate without censorship or political correctness, or they don't operate at all. No government that funds nuclear research can afford to care a damn what the Koran or the Mahabharata or Marxist-Leninism has to say about the nature of matter, or the fact that 30 percent of the voters in the USA may believe that the world was created in seven days. And why can they not afford to care? Because, since the early twentieth century, fundamental research in the natural sciences has been essential to the holders of political power in a way that the arts and humanities have not. It has been essential to war. To put the matter with brutal simplicity: Hitler learned the hard way that he lost little by driving out Jewish musicians and actors. However, it proved fatal to have driven out Jewish mathematicians and physicists." Id. at 43, 44. "From the point of view of the market, the only interesting culture is the product or serve that makes money. But let us not be anachronistic. In the cultural fields the contemporary concept of 'the market'--an undiscriminating, globalising search for maximum profit--is quite novel. Until a few decades ago the arts, even for those who made profits from them as investors or entrepreneurs, were not like other products. Dealing in art, publishing books, financing new plays or organizing the international tours of a great orchestra were not undertaken because they could be shown to be more profitable than selling women's lingerie. Duveen or Kahnweiler, Knopf or Gallimard would not have gone into the hardware business if it had been more lucrative than art dealing or book publishing. What is more, the concept of a single universal rate of profit to which all enterprise must conform is a recent product of the globalized free market, as is the concept that the sole alternative to going out of business is unlimited growth." Id. at 48. From "The Intellectuals: Role, Function and Paradox": "The age of the intellectual as the chief public face of political opposition has retreated into the past. Where are the great campaigners and signatories of manifestos? With a few rare exceptions, most notably the American Noam Chomsky, they are silent or dead. Where are the celebrated maitres a penser of France, the successors of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Camus and Raymond Aron, of Foucault, Althusser, Derrida and Bourdieu? The ideologists the late twentieth century preferred to abandon the task of pursuing reason and social change, leaving them to the automatic operations of a world of purely rational individuals, allegedly maximizing their benefits through a rationally operating market that naturally tended, when free of outside interference, towards a lasting equilibrium. In a society of unceasing mass entertainment, the activists now found intellectuals to be less useful inspirers of good causes than world-famous rock musicians or film stars, The philosophers could no longer compete with Bono or Eno unless they reclassified themselves as the new figure in the new world of the universal media show, a 'celebrity'. We are living in a new era, at least until the universal noise of Facebook self-expression and the egalitarian ideals of the internet have had their full public effect." "The decline of the great protesting intellectuals is thus due not only to the end of the Cold War, but to the depoliticisation of Western citizens in a period of economic growth and the triumph of the consumer society. The road from the democratic ideals of the Athenian agora to the irresistible temptations of the shopping centre has shrunk the space available for the great demonic force of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: namely, the belief that political action was the way to improve the world. Indeed, the object of the neoliberal globalization was precisely to reduce the size, scope and public intervention of the state. In this it was partly successful." Id. at 194, 198-199. Fuels my disappointment with legal education where the political, except the comfortable, neutered, purely symbolic political, is nonexistent. No more students, just customers and consumers of mind-candy.).

SHOCK AND AWE!

John Schulian, ed., Football: Great Writing About the National Sport (New York: Library of America, 2014) (From Mark Kram "No Pain, No GAIN": "Admittedly, it is not easy to control a game that is inherently destructive to the body. Tip the rules to the defense, and you have nothing more than gang war; move them toward the offense, and you have mostly conflict without resistance. Part of the NFL dilemma is in its struggle between illusion and reality; it wants to stir the blood without you really absorbing that it is blood. It also luxuriates in its image of the American war game, strives to be the perfect metaphor for Clausewitz's ponderings about real war tactics (circa 1819, i.e., stint on blood and you lose). The warrior ethic is central to the game, and no coach or player can succeed without astute attention to the precise fashioning of a warrior mentality (loss of self), defined by Ernie Barnes, formerly of the Colts and Chargers, as 'the aggressive nature that know no safety zones'." "Whatever normal is, sustaining that degree of pure aggression for sixteen, seventeen Sundays each season (military officers will tell you it's not attainable regularly in real combat) can't be part of it. 'It's a war in every sense of the word,' wrote Jack Tatem of the Raiders in They call Me Assassin. Tatem, maybe the preeminent hitter of all times, broke the neck of receiver Darryl Stingley, putting him in a wheelchair for life; by most opinions, it was a legal hit. He elaborated: 'Those hours before a game are lonely and tough. I think about, even fear, what can happen.' If a merciless intimidator like Tatum could have fear about himself and others, it becomes plain that before each game players must find a room down a dark and distant hall not reachable by ordinary minds." Id. at 272, 279-280. Shock and awe. Perhaps there is a psychological connection between the rise in football as the national sport and America's finding itself in constant conflict and endless war.).

LESSONS FROM HUCK FINN

Michael Pitre, Fives and Twenty-Fives: A Novel (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014) ("'You seem overly concerned with the American understanding of authority . . . 'You ask, From whence do the townspeople derive the authority to tar and feather the Duke and the Dauphine? You ask, From whence do the Granderfords gain the right to seek retribution against the Shephererson? Tell me, Kateb, why does authority interest you so? . . .  Kateb, Kateb . . . In the end, Huck must learn two very important lessons. First, that civilization is an illusion. Second, that the only authority is one's conscience.'" Id. at 254. Also, see Michiko Kakutani, "Iraq, Dread Is in the Air," Books of the Times, NYT, Thursday, 8/21/2014.).