My Fellow Hamsters

My Fellow Hamsters


Yesterday, at the gym while on a treadmill feeling like a hamster, I was introduced to a man I did not know by a fellow hamster. The man was stocky, wide as a tree trunk, eyes watery red carrying the prior nights suffering forward with him to the health club that day. I forget his name, he mentioned he was Jewish and did some sort of work in conflict resolution. He began to speak with the hamster I knew and his story was that he had a beef against Citibank in that he was trying to get a construction loan converted to a permanent mortgage and was having difficulty with the bank in making that final step to his new home. He was frustrated and spoke in detail and at length about the case, as he saw it. His suffering was palpable, his familiarity indicative of hours of pouring over the paperwork and internalizing every jot, every letter believing it was relevant to his life.
As I treaded staring at the endless images of a world gone bad being delivered by smiling faces on CNN that speak detached countenance, I half listened to his story about how the bank was refusing him, not honoring their promise and how his paperwork was actually different from theirs. He felt that somehow, someone had made changes to the file at the bank that favored them and placed him in a bad position financially and stood in the way of his finding a final resting place in the system of loans and interest payments. I morbidly mused that someone should have to fight to find their way to endless payments and finally death was bizarre but that this was our country, our world, our dream. We fought and died for exactly this privilege and, frequently, were locked out of even that world. I only asked if he was a lawyer, he replied no but that he had tons of experience in conflict resolution.
He went on at length speaking of rights, justice and perhaps a class-action lawsuit against the mega-bank and that he would make an internet posting to determine if he could muster enough souls for such an action. The internet, the final solution.. He seemed intelligent but was full of angst and kept repeating he had quite a lot of experience in conflict resolution negotiations. I wondered if he realized how small he felt and if he knew he was saying these things to bolster his bravado against a giant, him seemingly David with perhaps a lot less than even a slingshot at his disposal as his defense.
I wondered if he knew that all he felt important would quickly be cast aside in favor of the more arcane practice of law. That truth and feelings have no place in the courtroom. That law is only so much theatre and that justice is a complete illusion. That law energizes the idea of justice but betrays its existence in the final analysis. Did he know he would not find his feelings, his needs, even his paperwork to be unimportant? Did he not realize that he would find himself an unimportant case in a room without witnesses? A room full of strangers to him but not to each other? That the bank has an army of lawyers working full time to guard their empire and that judge was a lawyer too whose phone number is in the speedy dial of the bank lawyers? That the bar meets in Las Vegas every year - clearly the Mecca of education - and that the judges go their too?
That the black robe of anonymity was much darker, more duplicitous than the simple pristine Aryan outfits of the Klu Klux Klan and more dangerous to people of any color, any race, any gender was lost on this poor soul. The black robe states an opposite and misleading purpose. The only grace of the white Klan robe is that it states an honest, if not bigoted, perverted message. I puzzled over which was truly worse. One black, dishonest and horrific; the other white honest and equally horrific. As CNN blared about injustice breaking regularly for commercials, ever smiling, wiggling and primping for the camera; he wailed about his dilemma apparently unaware that the knowledge he required was thinly veiled in every report being made right there on the television. Ubiquitous injustice.
I was tempted to advise him to see what firm the bank was using and then to find a second firm who was close to the first one and offer a lot of money to the firm he would retain allowing them to simply make a phone call, tell the bank lawyers to place his paperwork on top of the stack and let them split up his fees and keep the extra money. I wanted to tell him that this was how it really worked and that all of his feelings were as unimportant as is any case that takes place in a closed room in a building heavily guarded where they have to be armed and have metal detectors at the entrance because what they do in there is not what the people were promised.
I relented as I have found that unless you have personally had experience; you would simply never believe the courts are really just a gang that is more concerned about transferring your wealth towards themselves and are frequently consumed with how their hair looks and what time the Chinese buffet closes rather than whether you are finding, if not justice, simply a tenable position in order to go forward in your life. That there is no litmus test for the end of the case as to whether or not it makes sense but rather it just becomes a pile of words - one on top of another - ending up in an incomprehensible mountain of nothing by design. No one thinking of the family, their work, the person, the man, the woman, the child. No moral litmus test that might ask, ‘did I do right here’ or ‘will these people be ok, did I treat them as I would my mother, my brother, my sister, myself’?
I knew he did not understand this. I was tempted to tell the hamster I did know that she should tell her friend he needs to find a way to reach one lawyer through another and simply funnel money through that connection. And that going to court to seek justice was like trying spit into the ocean and stay dry or it was akin to grabbing a wolf by one ear. That Jesus could walk on water but not save himself when righteous others sat in judgment of Him is all one needs to know in examining the perversion of law and words.
I wondered if he realized that justice was considered a quaint notion found only in the writings of the Founding Fathers but was considered an insignificant and small historical aspect of modern day legal practice. That he was speaking in a fashion so self-absorbed to have eclipsed his fundamental understanding of nature, of how the exercising of power of strong men over weaker men was akin to the laws of gravity, immutable, cruel and unrelenting.
Clearly, he was traumatized and ready for mental treatment knowing instinctively he was headed for cruel and unusual punishment-the cornerstone of law.
I had a brief reprieve thinking how the weight of law - like gravity - eventually makes us all sag and how this inescapable progression is proving all people will feel that weight. I understood though that he was retreating into a comfortably anachronistic world, simple yet juvenile like a fifth grade history book that prepares the next generation of victims, speaking of justice, rights and that he was creating a framework within which to function knowing he was up against an insurmountable task-to defend his life against well-dressed moneyed men and women. And on their turf, on their field of battle. Not his. He would be frisked and made to leave even his slingshot at the gates of this arena upon entering. That this is their house, their rules, their findings and that justice was theirs to do with as they see fit. That if you defer from their approach, they lock you up and show you they can make things even worse for you than simply being without a home or losing your life’s work. You lose your liberty and the freedom that comes with personal accomplishment.
That after such an experience you would be shattered as a man, a grotesque parody of your former self, made to avoid any form of mainstream living and actually be grateful for even the sunlight streaming into your empty day while the rest of the world works unaware that they too are only a step away from meeting these same people. That he could easily find himself going before the very same judge in an orange suit, shackles on his feet and hands, bound together and then by a loop of chain to the other five men some whom may have experienced the same back to back sleepless nights, cold and literally naked, an eerily strange iron place with iron door slamming sounds punctuating the night over and over again, mouth dry, pasty from having no toothbrush, unshaven, hair standing upright, looking like someone who might actually deserve such a fate. That he could go from a place of privilege to being permanently locked out from the system only to be grateful he was not locked up in it.
That his only form of ID would become a Safeway card. That income, insurance and ownership - of any kind - would become unavailable to him. Against this backdrop of understanding, I was tempted to scream to him that bribing was more effective, less painful and the only solution to his problem. Pay one lawyer to pay of another. It is legal. It is gravity. It is his only true right.