Personal essays
Independence Day 2023
Who is harmed
Years and years ago I wrote an answer book for a multivariable calculus text.
I made more money typesetting each page using TeX than I did for writing it - but even so the total wasn’t that big.
But works leads to work and I would do a job now and then for the publisher and they would send me a check.
They were very good at paying me fairly quickly, so I was surprised when a check never arrived for a job I did.
The mystery was solved when I got a call from the Cleveland police that someone had been caught cashing my check and others at a check cashing place.
The man had been stealing checks from people’s mailboxes for a while.
I reported the stolen check to the post office and they said they couldn’t accept the report from me.
They explained that it wasn’t my property that had been stolen - it was the property of sender.
“But they mailed it to me and the criminal walked onto my front porch and took the letter containing the check from my mail box.”
The view of the postal employee was that until I received the mail, it was the publisher’s stamp and the publisher’s property that had been stolen - not mine.
That hardly seemed fair to me. Not that I’m a great defender of the rights of big companies, but the publisher had written me a check and the check had been cashed - just not by the person they expected to pay.
I saw the point that it was the publisher’s money that was stolen - but it seemed that it was my mail that was stolen.
I was told that I didn’t have any standing in the case.
We removed the outside mailbox and cut a mail slot in our front door. One of the first things we did when we moved into our current house was cut a mail slot into this front door as well.
Also, the publisher was kind enough to send me a replacement check.
Real
So why couldn’t I report the lost mail or the stolen check?
I wasn’t the injured party.
In order to get our day in court we need to show how we were injured.
It’s come up over my lifetime at odd times.
When Kim was killed in a car accident, we had nothing to do with the criminal case.
Legally, we weren’t the injured party.
I have to say, the law baffles me.
And just when you think you might understand the principles involved, the Supreme Court steps in to say, “nope, you don’t.”
There were several examples.
I had no idea one of the affirmative action cases was brought because the policies discriminated against Asian applicants. Perhaps I missed this detail because the suit wasn’t brought by anyone who’d suffered harm and the only Asians who testified spoke in favor of affirmative action.
There was the student loan case that wasn’t brought by students who had paid off their loans in full or any individual who’d suffered harm but -
“Daniel, do you hear that sound?”
What?
“That’s the sound of people unsubscribing because you’re getting on your high horse.”
That’s ok. Today is the day on which we quote the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”
We pretend that “all men” means all of us. I hope that it will someday mean that and don’t understand those who work so hard to keep it from being so.
Imagined
So many of our injuries are imagined.
It’s that Mark Twain quote that, “Some of the worst things in my life never happened.”
We don’t ask someone out or apply for a job because what if they say “no”.
Think of your own “I didn’t” because “what if”s.
Well, Lorie Smith decided not to become a wedding website designer because she thought the Colorado anti-discrimination laws would force her to create websites for same sex marriages and she was against same sex marriages.
She never built websites. She felt she was injured because she couldn’t do this thing she wanted to do because she couldn’t do it without discriminating against people.
She didn’t put it that way - she would have said - without violating her religious beliefs.
Of course, that’s not all that didn’t happen to her.
She also claimed that a same-sex couple approached her to do design work for their wedding that included creating a website.
Bam. She was injured. Look at the actual work that she couldn’t do and charge for.
Except there was no same-sex couple looking to hire her. The guy who was named in the suit was a designer himself and said he had not have been looking for anyone else to do design work for him.
Oh, and he had been married for more than a decade so there was no wedding that he would have needed any design work for and he wasn’t gay so the work would not have been for a same-sex couple anyway.
Summing up. Not gay. Married. Not looking for work. Certainly not looking for work from someone who didn’t do that work.
But the case made it to the Supreme Court where the court found in favor of this woman was not asked to show that she’d been injured in any way.
I mention this because a lot of the analysis of this awful Supreme Court term has focused on what’s been lost for affirmative action and LGBTQ+ rights.
I’m equally concerned with what we’ve lost when it comes to the requirement of standing.
If more of these cases can be brought without clear standing then there will be more opportunity for this court to remove more rights from so many more groups who already are at a disadvantage.
On this Independence Day I ask that you raise a glass to that day when “all men” means all of us.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 171. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe