By Fairfax County/Northern Virginia/Maryland/Beltway criminal defense lawyer Jon Katz. Defending DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving, drugs, marijuana/medical marijuana/cultivation, sex cases, felonies and misdemeanors. Fighting tirelessly for the best possible results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com. Last year, after about two decades I reestablished contact with a lawyer who worked at my first law firm and who started practicing law around seven years before I. We got together for lunch soon after and again a few days ago. Little did I know beforehand how much we had in common about finding meaning in our relatively short lives on this planet. When at that law firm, I did not open up to many colleagues about my personal and political views and yearnings, particularly after hearing a law partner and my supervising senior associate praise Bush I's invasion of Panama months during lunch together -- coupled with praising the "war on drugs" that I have long seen as a war on the Bill of Rights -- after I started there as an associate, and saw yellow ribbons there during Gulf War I without a counterbalance of expressed concern about a war entered much too prematurely by Bush -- and found refuge at lunchtime with the peace demonstrators at the nearby Lafayette Park. I threw up my hands about whether I would get anywhere productive talking politics and social justice with my law firm colleagues -- beyond the fact that I did express my interest in doing pro bono work with the firm. Consequently, without telling my law firm colleagues, I reveled in attending my first conference of the National Organization of Marijuana Laws in 1990, where I shared my feelings of law firm isolation on such topics with some conference attendees; attended a pot freedom rally in Lafayette Park not long after; joined a friend in demonstrating against the Senate's authorizing Gulf War I; joined the second weekend march against Gulf War I; and took out a subscription to High Times in protest against a federal subpoena for the magazine's advertiser records, writing then-attorney general Dick Thornburgh that I had done so under such protest. When I left the firm after two years to join the Maryland Public Defender's Office, I was all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed that I had found the ultimate job where I could feel more comfortable being open with my colleagues about politics and social justice, but found no such enclave there for such discussions. Such like-minded people may have been there, but I did not find them -- maybe in part because I heard few people there speaking of such things that I agreed with, beyond our criminal defense work at hand, so did not seek them out -- although I found many who were truly devoted to providing top-flight service to indigent criminal defendants. Continue reading "What to do with the rest of one's life?"
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