Justice asleep at Costco

The other day at Costco I found a novel by Stacey Abrams entitled “While Justice Sleeps.” It is a courtroom thriller set in the Supreme Court of the United States.

A quick glance at the back inside cover flap told me that this book was, indeed, written by the Stacey Abrams from Georgia that I admire and consider a hero.

Stacey who?

A quick sidebar — In case you don’t know about her let me provide a quick summary of her accomplishments. Ms. Abrams served eleven years in the Georgia House of Representatives. During seven of those years she was the Minority Leader. In 2018 she was the Democratic candidate for Governor of Georgia.

She narrowly lost the race to Republican Brian Kemp who, at the time, was the Secretary of State of Georgia. In that position he had the responsibility of overseeing the election in which he was a candidate.

Despite many calls to recuse himself from supervising his own election, Kemp refused to do so. During his time as Secretary of State, Kemp purged as many as 1.4 million voters from the rolls and closed or relocated nearly half of the state’s polling places in non-white neighborhoods. In other words, Brian Kemp pre-selected who would get to vote when he eventually ran for governor.

After her loss in the governor’s race, Stacey Abrams really went to work. In the 2020 election, her organization “Fair Fight” is credited by many for the Democrats winning the the two Georgia Senate runoff election seats which resulted in the Democrats taking control of the US Senate.

Lew the cashier

Back to the story — While I was checking out, I couldn’t help but notice that the cashier looked several times at the cover of the book. When another employee came by he made of point of pulling the book out of the middle of my pile of scanned items, showed the cover to her, and said something I did not hear.

After I pulled my credit card from the reader, I stepped around the clear plastic barrier between myself and the cashier to pick up my purchases. I asked the cashier why he seemed so interested in Stacey Abrams. The guys face was clueless. He had no idea who Stacey Abrams was.

I indicated the book I was picking up and he said, “Oh, it was the cover with the blindfold on justice. That’s how wrong things are in our mixed up country.”

A needed history lesson

I just said “yeah” and left. But I wanted to say:

“Lew, didn’t you listen in school? Portrayals of Lady Justice, in paintings and in sculpture, ALWAYS show her blindfolded. The blindfold represents impartiality. The idea is that justice should be administered without regard to wealth, power, or status. What’s wrong with that?”

We all know less than we think we do

This experience reminded me just how quickly and easily people can jump to strong, and wrong, conclusions. This is caused by a combination of ignorance and ego.

This guy thought he had made a clever and witty observation when in fact he had just revealed his own ignorance. The only way to minimize error in such situations is to remain humble and be willing to learn when we are wrong – especially on topics that are not in our area of experience or expertise.

But how many of us can actually do THAT with any consistency? If I had actually taken the time to briefly educate this cashier about the blindfold on Lady Justice, what are the odds that he would have said, “Oh. Thank you. I didn’t know that.”?

Though those words are seldom heard, I believe we all could benefit from using them more often. Don’t let your ego prevent you from learning new things.

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Sources

“Stacey Abrams,” Wikipedia. Accessed on May 12, 2021.
“Lady Justice,” Wikipedia. Accessed on May 12, 2021.
Monica Marie Zorilla, “Stacey Abrams’ Novel ‘While Justice Sleeps’ to Be Adapted by Working Title Television,” Variety, May 11, 2021.