Insons Fino a Provato ... Ater

One of the beautiful things about blogs is the sharing. Not just the sharing in the posts, but also the sharing through other features. For example, on my blog there's a list of other blogs I like to read. (Look, it's there on your left.) This list is here partly to make it easier for me to see when people have updated and partly in the hopes that you, my readers, will try out these as well. Many of my friends have these blog rolls on their blogs. One of my friends even has two, he has one with his friends (like me!) and one with other people with whom he has something in common.

I read a post on one of these extra blogs the other day that made me shudder. To sum it up in the impression it gave me, a girl insisted criminal defense attorneys are the scum of the earth and should all die. Now, none of the language is actually in there. What she really claims is that there's a fundamental difference between these horrible people and good people like her, and she can't understand how they sleep at night and can't wait to punish them personally in court. But what really struck me was my first thought. I read this post of hers and immediately thought "well you certainly aren't black."

Tonight I watched CNN's Black in America. In some ways it reinforced the reaction I had. Tonight's episode discussed women and families. Tomorrow's will discuss men. Tomorrow will probably bring it home even more - why that was my reaction, I mean.

On the post, the girl says, "it takes a special kind of scum to defend rapists, drug dealers, and murders." I don't know what upsets me more, that she thinks all these people are automatically scum, or that she assumes they're all guilty. (And she wants to be an attorney!)

The CNN show covered a lot of different families, with a lot of different stories. Many of them highlighted the difficult situations in which people can find themselves. A single father working to raise his two kids gets evicted because the landlord is switching the property from apartments to a single family home. At the end of the segment, he's looking for a new place, but it's possible he and his two sons may need to go back to the homeless shelter. His son may have to start 5th grade at his 5th school. Stories like this play themselves out everyday in our country. And when a young boy grows up a bit and finds himself dealing drugs because it's the only way his family can get some money, or in a gang because it's the only way he can walk to school without getting shot, is he scum?

Sometimes people make poor choices, sometimes people act rashly in a flash of emotions, and sometimes people just wind up (being the wrong color) in the wrong place at the wrong time. None of this makes them scum. Are there some cold-hearted scummy people out there? Yes, I'll nominate Scott Peterson for one. But I will not nominate the drug dealers that I know are just down Telegraph. I will not nominate the confused young man whose culture has taught him to hear one thing and think it means another. And I certainly will not nominate the defense attorneys.

Scum or not, everyone deserves a fair trial with representation. It may not happen often, but if even the attorneys don't believe in it, goodness! we're all vampired.

(If you'd like to see the original post, it's here. But be forewarned, the author doesn't always post comments if she disagrees with them.)