divorces, and other red tape

So one day, a woman decided she didn’t want to be married to her husband anymore. Maybe she had been thinking about it for a while…in fact, I know that she had questioned her marriage for a good while. So she finally managed to get her husband to move out of her house. Now it’s time for the divorce proceedings

So the woman hired a lawyer, paid the retainer fee, and tried to move on in her life. But her husband was not the type of guy to be scared of the law, the judges and the courts in general. So first of all, the lawyer was trying to charge the husband for his wife’s lawyers fees. The husband’s attitude was, “I didn’t hire you…if you want me to pay, stop working on the case.”

Then the husband was expected to show up to court as a Defendant even though they are supposed to be Joint Petitioners. He said, If I’m a Joint Petitioner, then why am I a Defendant? When I’m accepted into the court as the Petitioner, I’ll be in court.

So the court date came this week, and he didn’t go. He got a call from the court clerk about where he was. His response was, “I’m home, obviously.” Then a couple days passed, and he got a call from the actual judge from the hearing that he missed. The judge asked why he missed the court date, and the husband said he wasn’t notified of the hearing. The judge said, “I have a copy of the letter (the woman’s) attorney sent you, and it says you were to be here on Wednesday.” The man said, “I only got a letter of intent to request a hearing.” The judge said, “well we rescheduled it, are you going to be there?” The man said, “When I get a letter from the court, with court letterhead summoning me to appear in court, I will be there. I could just as easily send a letter to the attorney saying, ’you are required to appear in Hell’ and it would have the same effect as the attorney’s first letter to me.”

The judge says, “You aren’t afraid of the court, are you?”

Here is where my ideas step in…

The power of the government, including the courts, lies in your belief that it is necessary. It lies in your fear of the consequences the government can impress upon you. If you have no fear, what power does the government hold? Would you look your fellow man in the eye if the government didn’t force you to? Or more importantly, has the government caused you to ignore your fellow man? Divide and conquer. Don’t help your brother, because that won’t help you gain the money you need to buy food, pay your rent, or buy a car. Don’t talk to strangers, because they could be a bad person. But if nobody talked to strangers, how would you know anybody other than your family? We are social creatures, we have realized that helping each other has helped us live easier. Just as the ants who work together to build an anthill. But we have been turned against each other. The last few elections have been split almost 50/50. What’s worse is that we feel bitter to the other humans that oppose our views. What the hell kind of system could serve mankind as a whole that turns our species against each other? Our founding fathers must be turning over in their grave by now.

At times I think about the way I write. I write to inform, to educate. When I look at past authors I see a grammatical stability. When I’m in chat rooms on the internet, I see a blatant disregard for grammar. So I feel that sometimes I must write in a language that is understood by all. I try to stay grammatically correct, but I don’t mind writing in a style that the younger generations can, not only understand, but can also relate to. There is no sense writing in Shakespeare’s style, when the majority of people can’t even understand what he is talking about. But I do caution myself to avoid gossipy, watered-down language. In today’s Attention Deficit Disorder society, I might as well jump from subject to subject.