Bullet Types
Serving as a lawyer requires a balancing of invisible bullets and actual bullets, and being able to recover from those interactions with deadly weapons.
Tangible Bullets
I’ve grown up around bullets. I’ve discovered that bullets have a different significance within each culture, and different effects on each community.
In my childhood home, my neighbor’s house was shot while my grandfather was walking our dog on the sidewalk outside. The next week, while I was at the lake with my grandmother, there was a shooting on the shore. In that same year, more people left my neighborhood, destination unknown, than I ever noticed before. There were more police than I had ever noticed before, too. I learned that there is a short distance between increased surveillance and the sounds of police sirens.
In my second home, we lived about 5 minutes away from Fort Dix McGuire? military base. I would hear shots constantly, but quickly learned it was nothing to worry about. They were training to shoot someone else, somewhere else. They were practicing to kill people. They were killing people. This was fine. However, when the shot was a little closer, at the El Sombrero Motel four houses down the street from me, police sirens would always follow.
Currently, I live next to a hunting club. Almost everyone in my town owns a gun, and no one locks them in a gun cabinet. Every year this leads to some kind of tragedy. My town is one of the most consistently red voting districts in New Jersey, but without the wealth of other red districts in NJ and with many of the societal struggles commonly associated with Appalachia. There’s no police sirens to follow the sounds of the shots here, but people still disappear to the unknown.
I came to law school to change the disparity in the surveillance, freedom, and punishment different groups experience, and in the ways justice is administered. Bullets are only one example of this, but they serve particularly well when thinking about lawyers and law students, both of which are battered with invisible bullets.
Invisible Bullets
Invisible bullets are different from real bullets. There’s no red blood or blue lights attached. They don’t kill on site, but they leave a path of trauma. Invisible bullets are hard to name. Robinson, although he returned from Vietnam, was shot by invisible bullets after shooting people with real bullets (Robinson's Metamorphosis).
Based on my experience in law school thus far, the legal field is battered by invisible bullets. What drove you to fight for racial justice? Why do you want to put people in prison? Why is money so important to you? What gave you the ability to dissociate so well from your work that you can be one of the best big law lawyers, from the top school in the most competitive legal market? These questions don’t have simple answers. |