MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND

It's a wet and rainy Memorial Day Weekend. 
South Florida's beaches and golf courses and outdoor malls will have to wait for another day. 

Court's are closed Monday so don't show up looking for a trial. 

Here's a couple of things to ponder:

When someone dies and we post an obituary on the blog, why do some people feel compelled to write awful things?

Ditto when someone retires. 

We would respect a negative comment if it wasn't anonymous. 

Ditto when someone runs for judge or is elected judge. 

The internet seems to be a great anonymous equalizer. It has become some sort of therapists couch where people feel free to open up and say the most awful things without fear. 

When someone gets a big case why do other lawyers snipe behind their backs? 

Why do lawyers resent the success of others? 

You know what we all need? 

More poetry in our lives. 

The writer Ray Bradbury wrote about his success as a writer and one of the things he said a successful writer needs to do is read poetry every day. 

So here is a poem. The Fisherman by W.B Yeats.  It's a bit deeper than the "there once was a man from Nantucket..." that many of our learned Judiciary's tastes run to: 

Although I can see him still—

The freckled man who goes

To a gray place on a hill

In gray Connemara clothes

At dawn to cast his flies—

It's long since I began

To call up to the eyes

This wise and simple man.

All day I'd looked in the face

What I had hoped it would be

To write for my own race

And the reality:

The living men that I hate,

The dead man that I loved,

The craven man in his seat,

The insolent unreproved—

And no knave brought to book

Who has won a drunken cheer—

The witty man and his joke

Aimed at the commonest ear,

The clever man who cries

The catch cries of the clown,

The beating down of the wise

And great Art beaten down.

Maybe a twelve-month since

Suddenly I began,

In scorn of this audience,

Imagining a man,

And his sun-freckled face

And gray Connemara cloth,

Climbing up to a place

Where stone is dark with froth,

And the down turn of his wrist

When the flies drop in the stream—

A man who does not exist,

A man who is but a dream;

And cried, “Before I am old

I shall have written him one

Poem maybe as cold

And passionate as the dawn.”

Coming Tuesday: The Bar Associations are lining up.  Letters are being sent to the Supreme Court in Tallahassee. Ask not for whom the bell tolls....it tolls for thee.