TRUSTEES MESSAGE Eyes Wide Open

Eyes Wide Open

By Anne P. Keeton Esq. Member-at-Large Freund, Freeze & Arnold A Legal Professional Association akeeton@ffalaw.com | 937.222.2424

Ifrankly struggled to write this article. As I put pen to paper, it is late September. As you read this, it will be mid-November, with all that an election year in this brave new world entails. Would that I had a crystal ball to know what will happen, what the future you will know that the current me does not. As I write, we sit solidly seven or so months into a pandemic that shows no sign of ending, a train on a track in a seemingly interminable tunnel. For many of us, our children are either learning virtually or in some hybrid format, both of which boggle the mind. Some of us found release in a slowed world. Some of us struggle financially. Others have lost loved ones to COVID-19, knowing they died alone and in pain. Some believe it’s all a hoax, a gimmick, fake news. There are maskers and anti-maskers. And, there are those of us – perhaps all of us – who just want the whole thing to be over. The pandemic alone was enough to open our eyes to the world around us and our house divided. But then Ananias reached out his hand, and scales fell, and those of us who were blind to racial injustices could see. Like Saul, I am certainly guilty. I watched as the Klu Klux Klan, or whatever white supremacists call themselves these days, marched down The Lawn at my beloved University of Virginia, torches held high, fiery light cast over contorted faces. I watched. I felt righteous indignation. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t do anything. Because, in my mind, I wasn’t the problem. After all, or so the argument goes, I wasn’t the little girl in my social studies textbook, standing in her best white Sunday dress, beaming happily at the prospect of a community lynching, a man’s feet dangling near her face (the rest of his body blessedly edited from the frame). I’m ashamed to say, it took watching a black man, dying face down in the asphalt, crying for his mother, for me to truly see. I mean, let’s face it. The chance of my sons being murdered in the street, crying for their mother, is slim to none. Because they are white. My eyes were opened, and I realized that, though I did nothing to deserve it, the foundation of my suburban two-stick-tree-six-ornamental-shrub life was built on the backs of my brothers on their knees. And now we have neighborhoods divided with Black Lives Matter and SupAnd, of course, it’s an election year. But not just any election year. An election year where, for the first time in conscious memory, people are flying flags – actual, candidate flags – from their homes. Each camp so entrenched that we no longer see reason, much less hear and answer the call to love our neighbor no matter how unlovable they may seem. I don’t have a crystal ball. But, if the next month unfolds in the same way as the nine before it, it will do so unpredictably and without precedent. If you’re like me, the uncertainty is at times overwhelming. All of which to say, 2020’s been a hell of a year. And not in a good way. I think it safe to say the year 2020 has wounded us and revealed chinks in the armor of our nation, our community, and ourselves. Wounds that must be tended and healed, lest they fester. Chinks that must be mended and rewrought stronger than before. port Our Police signs, as though the two ideas are antithetical. (They are not.) And, that, my friends, is where we come in. We are the

Then Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Notorious RBG, laid her considerable burden next, right thing. As lawyers, we are uniquely positioned down, and generations of women (and men) felt grief. Because, as with Scalia to probe and tend these wounds. To identify injustice and before her, regardless of how folks feel about many of her political views, few right it. To speak reason and truth to power, and to our can discredit her judicial scholarship or her passion for the law and justice. She neighbor. To sow understanding and accord where there and her Italian-American bosom friend, counterweights to the same load, could is strife. If we will only pick up the burden. teach us all a thing or two about discourse and integrity. As seems to happen these days, no sooner had RBG sought her eternal reward than the vultures circled and swooped in from both sides of the aisle. Turning what should have been a moment of reflection and honor and dignity and grief into a political feeding frenzy of hypocrisy. (Both sides should be ashamed of themselves.) Out of that feeding frenzy came the nomination to the United States Supreme Court of Amy Coney Barrett, whose resume, by all accounts, suggests her qualified for the job. But, she’s a mother! How could she possibly do her job and be a mother? She’s Catholic! How can she possibly do her job and be a person of faith? (Because, you know, faithful women can’t possibly do their jobs.) But she might be a deciding vote to reverse prior Supreme Court precedent! Yes, and what else is new? At the Supreme Court’s private memorial ceremony for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt spoke of Justice Ginsberg as a prophet, who saw beyond the world she was in and imagined something different: “And it is the rare prophet who not only imagines a new world but also makes that new world a reality in her lifetime.” May it also be with us. Isn’t that the way of it with Supreme Court appointments?