Reflections of a stormy petrel

I am not an accomplished lawyer. I find quite as much material for a lecture in those points wherein I have failed, as in those wherein I have been moderately successful. The leading rule for the lawyer, as for the man of every other calling, is diligence. Leave nothing for to-morrow which can be done to-day. Never let your correspondence fall behind. Whatever piece of business you have in hand, before stopping, do all the labor pertaining to it which can then be done. When you bring a common-law suit, if you have the facts for doing so, write the declaration at once. If a law point be involved, examine the books, and note the authority you rely on upon the declaration itself, where you are sure to find it when wanted. The same of defenses and pleas. In business not likely to be litigated, — ordinary collection cases, foreclosures, partitions, and the like, — make all examinations of titles, and note them, and even draft orders and decrees in advance. This course has a triple advantage; it avoids omissions and neglect, saves your labor when once done, performs the labor out of court when you have leisure, rather than in court when you have not. Extemporaneous speaking should be practised and cultivated. It is the lawyer’s avenue to the public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business if he cannot make a speech. And yet there is not a more fatal error to young lawyers than relying too much on speech-making. If any one, upon his rare powers of speaking, shall claim an exemption from the drudgery of the law, his case is a failure in advance.

Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser — in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough.

Never stir up litigation. A worse man can scarcely be found than one who does this. Who can be more nearly a fiend than he who habitually overhauls the register of deeds in search of defects in titles, whereon to stir up strife, and put money in his pocket? A moral tone ought to be infused into the profession which should drive such men out of it.

The matter of fees is important, far beyond the mere question of bread and butter involved. Properly attended to, fuller justice is done to both lawyer and client. An exorbitant fee should never be claimed. As a general rule never take your whole fee in advance, nor any more than a small retainer. When fully paid beforehand, you are more than a common mortal if you can feel the same interest in the case, as if something was still in prospect for you, as well as for your client. And when you lack interest in the case the job will very likely lack skill and diligence in the performance. Settle the amount of fee and take a note in advance. Then you will feel that you are working for something, and you are sure to do your work faithfully and well. Never sell a fee note — at least not before the consideration service is performed. It leads to negligence and dishonesty — negligence by losing interest in the case, and dishonesty in refusing to refund when you have allowed the consideration to fail.

There is a vague popular belief that lawyers are necessarily dishonest. I say vague, because when we consider to what extent confidence and honors are reposed in and conferred upon lawyers by the people, it appears improbable that their impression of dishonesty is very distinct and vivid. Yet the impression is common, almost universal. Let no young man choosing the law for a calling for a moment yield to the popular belief — resolve to be honest at all events; and if in your own judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer. Choose some other occupation, rather than one in the choosing of which you do, in advance, consent to be a knave.

Abraham Lincoln, 1850

A few days ago I wrote an entry about the problems that my tendency to rage caused in my relationships with others. I have no doubt that a lot of people will have read the last entry - about the abomination that is Dutch law, especially on euthanasia, and about the atrocious behaviour of the Dutch government in the matter of Ayaan Hirsi Ali - and thought of that. Except that in this case, this does not apply.

Everything is right in proportion. It is wrong and silly to burst into fury over some fandom quarrel - such as the Blaise Zabini affair a while back - even though I may feel that I am in the right, or at least that I have a good argument that other people insist on refusing to understand. But when you are dealing with mass murder under the most obscene conditions and for the most obscene reasons, then exactly the opposite is the case. Then what is wrong is to yeld to the temptation of politeness; and speak and act as though mass murder were a reasonable, sensible, civilized alternative to be discussed in courteous tones - instead of a foul abomination whose very mention ought to make us shudder with disgust and wonder at a world where such things do not bring down fire from the sky.

A few days ago we celebrated Mother's Day. I have been particularly lucky in my mother - as beautiful as she is intelligent, as brave as she is unselfish, and so full of good things that it took me some time to realize that, like all other human beings, she had her flaws. To be sure, not everyone has my good luck - I could mention my mother's own sister, but I won't. There are indifferent or bad mothers. But having said that, everyone knows this: that only the greatest saints perform, in their lives, as many unselfish and helpful and loving things as a quite ordinary mother does in the ordinary course of her work. She is alwyas the one who takes the bad part of the chicken, who stays up late if the baby cannot sleep, who carves out time in her scarce timetable to take her child to school or to play - who is there a million times, too often to mention, until you realize that you have relied on her all your life and taken it quite for granted. After all, what is the one thing that no man will let pass, what is the one thing that nobody will ever allow to be said in his presence? We all know it: "Don't you dare touch my mother. You can say what you want about me, but, by God, don't you dare touch my mother." Thugs and criminals revere one thing in their filthy lives - their mother - when they revere nothing else. Sane men and women know it instinctively. It is for this reason, for this background of unselfish love that lies like a mountain wall all around the beginnings of our lives, the towering protection and help that has made us born and fed us and kept and helped us grow, that we Christians have come to see in the Blessed Virgin the highest of all saints: if that is what is our mother means to us, how much more - of the same, but how much more - must have been in the mother of the Saviour, in the mother of God in man? It is for this reason, just as any self-respecting man will fight for his mother's good name, that Christians going to war to save their nations and their people from oppression, have many, many times seen above the terror of the battlefield, warm and loving and peaceful in her blue mantle, Our Lady of Victories; and charged in Her name, through terror and pain and death, to victory and salvation.

This is what I, what any person, owes to his or her mother. The intensity of the love of the average person for his or her mother is not commonly realized, for the same reason why we do not stop to think that we look on the world from a walking six-foot tower; that it is fundamental to us. And as for our mother, so for our father. Our father is different - he is the person who comes in from outside, the voice of a strange stern world of work and fatigue and contact with little-known and unsympathetic beings, bosses, colleagues, clients. But he is the one who feeds us and looks after us; the one we go to in trouble or fear; the last bulwark in our need; and, on occasion, the extravagantly generous source of largesse - if mother is the one who will always give us a candy bar or a banana, father is the one who from time to time will slip us, from the apparently infinite resources of his labour and of his sometimes saturnine kindness, the unimagined wonder of a twenty-pound note or of a new bicycle or of a TV. As a rule, it will come as a surprise, and when you least expected it - and you realize that he has heard you talk about god knows how far back, and kept it in his mind. The average human's love for his/her father may not be as intense, as flesh-warm, as passionate, as that for the mother; but it is not less deep. He is the standard of value, the authority whose views are deferred to and whose statements are quoted. He is the first hero we look up to, and the first person in whom we have absolute confidence, even - strange mystery of the human soul - when we rebel against him.

Yes, there are men and women who fall short of this - even very far short. But this is what being a father, being a mother, means. And even those among fathers and mothers who fall far short of the ideal, still can call on us for a debt that cannot be repaid: they made us. Their will is the reason we are here. And in so far as they were father and mother at all, however little that may have been, to that extent they were those great and beloved figures. There is no other fatherhood or motherhood. And there is no human being who does not deserve one, or wish they had when they had not.

And in the course of normal, sane human life, the time comes when we can, if not repay them for what they have done for us - which is quite literally impossible - at least make manifest to them our gratitude and our love. It is when they are old; when they are weak; when they perhaps have regressed, and need - for the first time - our help. This is a privilege that life gives us: that in a forest of unpaid and unpayable obligations, of random events and people we meet once and never again, there are two people in the world to whom we can do something to repay what they have done for us. As a rule, we do not do enough. By the standards of what the average mother has done throughout her life, it would not be too much, when she is old and weak, to carry her around on your back, or, like Solon's two young men, pull her chariot like oxen. Luckily such shifts are rarely needed; but it certainly is our function, once our parents can no longer look after themselves, to look after them. What decent human being would think otherwise?

A Dutchman. A Dutchman would think otherwise. A Dutchman would think that the proper reward for the life his parents gave him is a bullet through the head, or rather, since that is what we are talking about, a lethal injection. A Dutchman would think that the proper reward is not to look after your father after his fourth heart attack, or your mother under advanced Parkinson's, but to let them die. Die with dignity, they call it.

Let us not even speak the base and disgusting reason behind ninety per cent of these displays of love - money; let us leave unmentioned the expense and time that it takes to look after a fragile old person who is never going to get better, because, truly, the only problem with him or her is old age - the weariness of years many of which were spent in your service. Let us assume that the Dutch really mean it, and do not lie like Dutchmen, when they say that what they really dread is the loss of dignity. Do you know what that means? Moral cowardice. It means not to be able to look at the horror of human life in the eye - the horror of illness, the horror of helplessness, the horror of dependency and exhaustion and pain and loss of control. It means taking death as an escape from these facts of life; and taking it, not for oneself, but for others - removing the object of horror from your sight, so that you do not have to be reminded that one day you, too, will be like this - trembling, helpless, weak, dribbling, blind, cold. It means killing people rather than be reminded that people must die. This is the noble, the elevated, the lofty principle of choice - that choice which begins when the doctor marks an old person down for the exit lounge, and ends when the old person, pestered and prodded by eager relatives and heartless medics, weary and sick and tired of life, or perhaps too far gone to understand, gives an extorted consent - and "dies with dignity."

As a Dutch citizen, dreamer_marie will, if her parents live long enough, be eventually asked to consent to their murder; this is certain. I hope that she has enough human left in her - to quote Hagrid - to tell the first, second and third person who make such a suggestion to go jump out the window; but what if she is so stuffed with the fraud of euthanasia to see what it is that she is consenting to? What if I am speaking with a person who, one day, will have her parents killed - because that is the way things are done where she comes from? Should I have been polite about it? Does anyone have such a vile idea of me as to expect me, for a minute, to be polite about it? Now that would be an insult.

And as for the horrendous cowardice of many Dutchmen in the matter of Hirsi Ali, I think it is directly connected. This nation has sold its soul. It has collectively signed its own death warrant, person by person. Each Dutchman or Dutchwoman who lives long enough will be eventually a candidate for the lethal injection. And it has done so on one promise, for one reason: for the promise of having, until the day it runs out, a "high quality of life" - life without stress, without chronic illness, without fear or trouble or hate. And just as those nations in which the relationship between parents and children is still sane will in fact fight for principles and justice and to defend the country, so, conversely, the intrusion of the violence and hatred of the outside world must seem, to the Dutch, the ultimate violation of their pact with the Devil. What, they have signed their own lives away - they have handed themselves body and soul to the State to decide how long they will live - and they cannot even be preserved from the intrusion of Islamic violence and the need to resist terrorism? No, no, no! Too horrible to contemplate. Drive out the cause of contention; drive out the person who draws the hatred with her; and let us hide away from other people's anger, and cradle the only thing that our Devil's pact has given us - that precious, all too precious quality of life.

This is what dreamer_marie defriended me rather than have to defend. Can you blame her? And do you see a pattern there?