Tolerance and Helplessness.

It was in the early 1990s, when my mother started to be harassed by a mentally unstable individual.

He was, ostensibly, a student at the local community college.  My mother's house wasn't far from the college, which is one of the reasons she liked the house.  She had an active mind for most of her 90 plus years and that allowed her to be close to the college to take courses if she wished to.  It was also close to the YMCA.  She could walk to either, which she did frequently, as she didn't drive.

The young man yelled vile abuse at her and threatened her.  Horrible profane language and threats.  In an earlier age, most people would have regarded him as possessed.  And frankly, it's not impossible that he was.

He dressed in a bizarre fashion.  A huge beret like French alpine troops, but only French alpine troops, wear and a long black trench coat.  His path lead him occasionally past her house and he'd catch her on her way to or from the YMCA.

Soon after it happened, and it became clear it was going to repeat, I called the police.  The female police officer I spoke to was blasé about it.  Yes, they knew who he was.  Yes, they knew about him.  No, nothing could be done "until" he'd done something violent.

Until then.

I looked into filing a stalking action, again in an attempted cooperation with the police.  "Well, Officer Blasé informed me, even if I did that, they really wouldn't be able to do anything "until" he did something violent.

My dear aunt was also aware of my mother's plight, and did some checking.  The young man was the son of a physician and he lived at home.  He was well past community college age but he was an "art" student.  The art professors at the college were in desperate fear of him as he acted up badly in class. They were passing him through with flying colors in the hopes he'd leave.  His undoubtedly distraught parents were warehousing him while this process went on, apparently not knowing what else to do.

I thought about going over to their house or calling them and demanding they intervene.  But obviously, their backbones were made of noodles and they weren't going to.  

This went on for years.  I'd occasionally catch glimpses of the fellow but never in any sort of act.  His behavior towards my mother would die down, and then come back.  It decreased over the years but never fully went away until he obtained a scholarship, no doubt based on his bogus grades, to a four year university somewhere and left.

None of this should have occurred.  The police were no help. Society was no help.  Only my relatives were help.  I felt like I failed, and I probably really did.

I've grown a lot older.  Now, I doubt I'd handle it the same way.  People believe that with age comes caution but it's not really true.  Now, I'd probably confront the man, but who knows how that would have gone.  It's clear that the law and the authorities not only were no help, they weren't even interested in being help.

In a much earlier era, well even into the 1970s, the law would have helped.  Some of that help would have been, quite frankly, illegal, but it happened.  And self help was highly tolerated.

The world has gotten better in so many ways, and we can say for at least now, perhaps in most ways.  But in regards to some thing, the demand for tolerance has turned to helplessness.

Monday At The Bar: Mistrial

The American public is getting an education regarding its legal process via the recent Cosby trial.

I'm not going to go into the allegations in part because I don't follow criminal stuff very closely.  Quite a few people who aren't lawyers would find that odd, but quite frankly just because a person is a lawyer doesn't mean that they follow every aspect of their own profession in the same fashion that sports fans follow a favorite team.  Indeed, most of us don't.  I've done very little criminal law myself and most major crimes leave me queasy in one sense or another, so I don't really pay very much attention to them.

Some you can't ignore, however, no matter what as they're Really Big Deals, and by that I mean big deals in either the true societal sense or, alternatively, in the sense of the press following the story closely.  The "O. J. Trial", for example, gives us an example of the latter.

Anyhow, the jury hung in this one, and a mistrial was declared. So now people are familiar with what that means. 

I wonder if it also means that people personally paid much attention to the legal maxim of "presumed innocent until proven guilty".  I doubt it.

But maybe they have no obligation to on a personal level.  

Certainly hardly anyone thinks that about O. J. Simpson.  It's pretty much universally agreed that he was guilty and that the jury that found him innocent was out to lunch, or perhaps beguiled by spectacular lawyering by his defense team and other factors.

Here, it would seem, Bill Cosby was well represented.  But additionally, jurors might have had evidence that we basically never hear.  The press generally does a really poor job of reporting any legal matter.  In this instance, without knowing the details, at least half the jurors apparently thought that whatever happened, the tort didn't. 

But that takes us back to the public's eye.  No matter what actually happened, Cosby's reputation is permanetnly shot and its never coming back. He's not going to experience a latent revival of his reputation like Fatty Arbuckle, who enjoyed that only briefly.  Indeed, Arbuckle's fall for being accused of a crime he didn't commit lead him to being shunned by Hollywood for a long time, and he only came back really as a director in 1933, finishing a film, celebrated a marriage anniversary, commenting that "This is the best day of my life", and dying that night at age 43. 

Not really a happy ending.

Cosby is well past 43.  His reputation as a family man and a man who successfully became an American icon while also representing the urban black demographic, is completely shot.  Maybe that's punishment in and of itself no matter what his crimes or torts may have been, for leading a personal life of decadent sexual behavior irrespective of its legality.

In the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence John Ford counseled When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."  The lives of the famous, in the current age, tend to suggest that this is no longer true.

It probably never should have been.