Trial

My brother knew he wanted to be a lawyer when he was twelve.  We were home-schooled and my parents went for the super, high-tech "video school", which ended up giving my brother his inspiration.  These were pre-recorded classrooms from an ultra-conservative school in Florida that we watched subject by subject, day by day.  I remember very little except being out-of-my-mind jealous of the children that had experienced these classes in real time and with each other, but, for my brother, the videos changed his life.  In particular, the government teacher he had for his sixth grade recorded lessons. 

And he never wavered, except for his foundational political views of course.  When he was twelve, it was all Reagonomics and holiness doctrine, but that quickly changed.  Even in his teens, he was starting to experiment with Nihilism and borderline heresies, but Wheaton and then Carrel helped him settle into an edgy Liberal jaunt. 

He is now a registered and active Democrat and a fucking poor civil rights' lawyer.  The case that has occupied his decade revolves around health benefits being denied to Texan kiddos by the unwieldy bureaucracy and greed.  That one is quite simply going no where.  The process of appeals and circuits and endless self-referential documents will probably occupy the next decade at least.

In the wings has been a slam dunk of a racial discrimination case...had it been tried anywhere other than East Texas.  We spoke today in the wake of the case being lost and he seemed near breaking when he summarized the opposition's winning remarks: "Talking about race is hard in East Texas because they don't mean anything by the hateful words they have learned to use."  And what do you do when a full jury has lived here long enough to buy that executives in East Texas are just too ignorant to be held accountable for the ingrained injustices of the institutions they oversee?  So a poor black man pulled through the maelstrom of habitual and generational bigotry will now probably die before he sees anything close to recompense.  And my brother inches just that much closer to being proved right that nothing really matters.