Travelblogue: Week 9 of 13: The Gadfly

Monday, July 9: My Gadfly

Today I met an abrasive old man that blatantly challenged my life choices. Socrates, anyone?

I was standing in the casual carpool line, minding my own business, when this hold-over from the hippie activist era starts talking to me. And before you know it it's:

"You know, I was an HLS grad too, back in '67. I used to do sit-ins in the South. I hate George Bush and his cronies. This country's going to shit. I'm a lawyer for poor people and civil liberties. You shouldn't work for a corporate firm. That's for greedy, soul-less sell-outs. I pay my summer intern $15 an hour. And they do real, purposeful, IMPORTANT work, not like you pencil-pushing slaves to the Man."

I looked at his beat-up briefcase with frayed corners, his low-rent clothes, his smug expression of contempt, and was quite dismayed when we happend to share the same car to work.

Tuesday, July 10: A World of Judgment

Today I went to, what felt like, a roomful of judgment.

I attended one of the many fundraising meals that big law firms sponsers to support legal defense funds for the indigent, battered, and generally dispossesed.

The cynic would say: this is how Biglaw market themselves to new recurits as kind and caring.

The optimist would say: this is how Biglaw shows that it can be kind and caring.

The one steeped in a guilt-based western religion would say: this is how Biglaw purges its guilty conscience from its seven-figure salaries and pencil-pushing slavery to the Man when it should be devoting itself to defending the poor and powerless.

Usually this kind of event wouldn't cause any introspection on my part, but then who should show up, but my own personal Gadfly! How did he find me in a roomful of over 500 stuffy suits?

Then came the predictable barrage of disparagements:

"Don't you wish you were doing this kind of work for the poor and oppressed? You rode a taxi here? My gosh you have money to burn! It's only a 20 minute walk. I guess you need to go back to your "important" work now (dripping with sarcasm)."

If ever I felt like an acolyte of a guilt-based western religion, it was today.

Thursday, July 12: We've got to stop meeting like this.

I went to a reception thrown by the local bar association for Judges. It's a meet-and-greet, press-the-judge's-flesh kind of mingle with big and small law firms alike.

Guess who I saw again? Yeah.

So he insists that I set up a lunch meeting with him next week and I'm too tired to fight it. Maybe he'll say something interesting. Maybe he'll just stoke the fire of guilt some more. And maybe I'll rethink my whole life.

Postscript:

It would be easy for me to dismiss this man. It would be easy to justify any job as fulfilling the cultural mandate to subdue the earth in some regard. Each worker, in his own fashion, is making some order out of chaos.

It would be easy to dismiss the large checks as merely a hazard that "comes with the territory." And as we can all recite, it's not money that is evil, but the "love of money," aka greed.

But what is not easy to dismiss is my own fear of poverty, my strong desire for secuirty, and the fact that everyone's standards of what is "moderate living" is only relative.

I should also say that I wish never to arrogate myself as judge over those who may choose what the Gadfly disapproves of. Who am I to say who is good and who is evil, or even what is good and what is evil? The heart of man is a nasty labyrinth. His true motives, who can know?