double vision

This is the season of still fire in the leaves of the matchstick stands
of birch that huddle within changeless swaths of spruce and pine.

And the most diseased human habitation I have ever witnessed exists in the midst of this beauty - vast lands of unlogged forest, measureless waterways of lake, marsh, and river.

This is where the law's dissonance booms. It sounds like the sighs of a court party forced to (literally) pick the locks of doors to set up its temporary chamber, and begin its proceedings (literally) in the dimness of a hall whose lights it has no power or knowledge to operate. It sounds like the echo of names called into the sparse lobby of a community centre that, although recently built, is already scarred by the stone-throws and scrawlings of gas-addled youth; names of witnesses or accuseds whose absence prompts frustrated warrants of arrest, and the consequent lumbering of police trucks along pockmarked gravel roads.

Disengagement feels like the bruise my spirit accepts in the knowing that so many of my clients will run the whole course of their legal ordeals without ever facing a single fact of their enfetterment, and that they will be turned back, in the end, into the whip of a suffering/harming cyclone. It is the sadness of hearing a client tell me that his accuser will fare far worse than himself "because no one likes a rat round here". And it lies in the silence of victims who, in bowing to this granite logic, put their own necks into the law's headlock.

No one amplifies their voices, the way I do on my clients' behalf. Therein lies, as even Conservatives know, a crucial question, a distorted twist of truth. But does the answer lie in ramping up the rhetorc of war, of pounding ever harder on these rickety tables that we erect in the centres of communities whose ills and rhythms we yet weakly pretend to comprehend?

This of course is the rub, the nub of it. The elephant whose hulk rests unaddressed in this district's rootless courts, in our so-called universal law, and in the ongoing collision of our cultures. As I go about my work, I just want to acknowledge this.