Trustees Message
Eyes Wide Open
By Anne P. Keeton Esq. Member-at-Large Freund, Freeze & Arnold A Legal Professional Association akeeton@ffalaw.com | 937.222.2424
I
frankly struggled to write this article. As I put pen to paper, it is late September. As you read this, it will be mid-November, with all that an election year in this brave new world entails. Would that I had a crystal ball to know what will happen, what the future you will know that the current me does not. As I write, we sit solidly seven or so months into a pandemic that shows no sign of ending, a And, of course, it’s an election year. But not train on a track in a seemingly interminable tunnel. For many of us, our children are either learnjust any election year. An election year where, ing virtually or in some hybrid format, both of which boggle the mind. Some of us found release for the first time in conscious memory, people in a slowed world. Some of us struggle financially. Others have lost loved ones to COVID-19, are flying flags – actual, candidate flags – from knowing they died alone and in pain. Some believe it’s all a hoax, a gimmick, fake news. There their homes. Each camp so entrenched that are maskers and anti-maskers. And, there are those of us – perhaps all of us – who just want the we no longer see reason, much less hear and whole thing to be over. The pandemic alone was enough to open our eyes to the world around answer the call to love our neighbor no matter us and our house divided. how unlovable they may seem. But then Ananias reached out his hand, and scales fell, and those of us who were blind to I don’t have a crystal ball. But, if the next racial injustices could see. Like Saul, I am certainly guilty. I watched as the Klu Klux Klan, or month unfolds in the same way as the nine bewhatever white supremacists call themselves these days, marched down The Lawn at my beloved fore it, it will do so unpredictably and without University of Virginia, torches held high, fiery light cast over contorted faces. I watched. I felt precedent. If you’re like me, the uncertainty is righteous indignation. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t do anything. Because, in my mind, I at times overwhelming. wasn’t the problem. After all, or so the argument goes, I wasn’t the little girl in my social studies All of which to say, 2020’s been a hell of a textbook, standing in her best white Sunday dress, beaming happily at the prospect of a commuyear. And not in a good way. I think it safe nity lynching, a man’s feet dangling near her face (the rest of his body blessedly edited from the to say the year 2020 has wounded us and reframe). I’m ashamed to say, it took watching a black man, dying face down in the asphalt, crying vealed chinks in the armor of our nation, our for his mother, for me to truly see. I mean, let’s face it. The chance of my sons being murdered community, and ourselves. Wounds that must in the street, crying for their mother, is slim to none. Because they are white. My eyes were be tended and healed, lest they fester. Chinks opened, and I realized that, though I did nothing to deserve it, the foundation of my suburban that must be mended and rewrought stronger two-stick-tree-six-ornamental-shrub life was built on the backs of my brothers on their knees. than before. And now we have neighborhoods divided with Black Lives Matter and SupAnd, that, my friends, is where we come in. We are the port Our Police signs, as though the two ideas are antithetical. (They are not.) next, right thing. As lawyers, we are uniquely positioned Then Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Notorious RBG, laid her considerable burden to probe and tend these wounds. To identify injustice and down, and generations of women (and men) felt grief. Because, as with Scalia right it. To speak reason and truth to power, and to our before her, regardless of how folks feel about many of her political views, few neighbor. To sow understanding and accord where there can discredit her judicial scholarship or her passion for the law and justice. She is strife. If we will only pick up the burden. and her Italian-American bosom friend, counterweights to the same load, could teach us all a thing or two about discourse and integrity. As seems to happen these days, no sooner had RBG sought her eternal reward than the vultures At the Supreme Court’s private memorial circled and swooped in from both sides of the aisle. Turning what should have been a moment ceremony for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Rabbi of reflection and honor and dignity and grief into a political feeding frenzy of hypocrisy. (Both Lauren Holtzblatt spoke of Justice Ginsberg as sides should be ashamed of themselves.) a prophet, who saw beyond the world she was Out of that feeding frenzy came the nomination to the United States Supreme Court of Amy in and imagined something different: “And Coney Barrett, whose resume, by all accounts, suggests her qualified for the job. But, she’s a mother! it is the rare prophet who not only imagines a How could she possibly do her job and be a mother? She’s Catholic! How can she possibly do her new world but also makes that new world a rejob and be a person of faith? (Because, you know, faithful women can’t possibly do their jobs.) But ality in her lifetime.” May it also be with us. she might be a deciding vote to reverse prior Supreme Court precedent! Yes, and what else is new? Isn’t that the way of it with Supreme Court appointments? 4
Dayton Bar Briefs November 2020
937.222.7902
