It’s Tuesday. Monday was yesterday, and yeah, I’m aware there was no post. Stuff was happening yesterday. Las Vegas saw a gunman take over 50 lives and damage hundreds, if not thousands, of others. Some guy drove a truck into a crowd in Edmonton over the weekend. The internet was aflame and brightly burning with the cries of the world as everyone tried to make sense of the tragedy.
Except me. I made jokes. When it was stated that the shooter in Las Vegas was a country music fan, I was quick to jump on it with “Except, apparently, for Jason Aldean.”
When a gun manufacturer tweeted that “Prayers were the best armor,” I couldn’t stop myself from saying “Except for our products. They don’t do anything about our products.”
When someone asked, seriously, if they should lie in order to donate blood because they were gay, I answered “Yeah, but not about being gay. Just lie about some random stuff. Tell’em you’re the King of Sweden or something.”
This is what I do. I respond to tragedy with humor, because many, many times in the course of my work I get to see human tragedy up close and personal. Yeah, it’s not as visceral as responding to a shooting or a burning building, but when you work with people in trying times you tend to see them get ready to fall apart, or watch their entire world end with a single judgment or court order, and it isn’t pleasant to see that stuff day in and day out. The rest of the time? The rest of the time lawyers can be some dark sons of bitches. It doesn’t mean we don’t care, though, because we’re still humans…the humor is a coping mechanism for the horribleness of the world, a way to get through to the next case or the next client after something truly terrible walks through the doors of the office.
But sometimes we just need something good. It’s why lawyers have things like “that one case” where they did something good or saw something awesome happen. It helps us stave off the terrible things that sometimes come through our offices.
So that’s what we’re doing today. We’re gonna talk about a good aspect of the legal system and let people have a little time to recover from the insanity that has been the past three days.