Drunk on Power

I had to attend a court hearing with someone the other day. I have not been in a court of law in say, twenty something years. I walked in and was immediately approached by the police officer on duty, and she said ‘take those off your head’ and I looked at her dumb struck.

‘What on earth is on my head that is so offensive?'

‘Your eye glasses, take them off now!'

Okay, I thought to myself and folded my reading glasses and stuck them looped into the front of my shirt so that I could locate them again. I did not understand why my eye-glasses offended her, but I thought, okay, we’ll let it slide.

I sat down with my backpack full of books, pens and writing pad as I am in the middle of writing two papers for the end of term, the end of term is now and it is starting to stress me a bit, so I thought well, in case this takes some time I will use it to my benefit and work on my papers.

I was right, it took three hours and a bit. But, as I pulled my pens out of my back pack and set my books and papers beside me, the police officer swooped down on me again.

‘You can’t write in a court of law,’ she shouted at me.

I said nothing and put the pens into my back pack and sat there for a few minutes thinking about this. So, you cannot write, perhaps it is so you won’t write down sensitive information. Okay, it’s a privacy issue, fair enough. Even though I had no intention of writing down what I heard, but simply what I was studying about. I felt I had figured out the pens, but I still felt perplexed about the eye-glasses on top of my head. Okay, I think I will just read then, perhaps she won’t mind if my eye-glasses are on my face as I can see lots of other people with them on.

I managed half a paragraph of Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory and suddenly I have the same police officer in my face again...

‘You can’t read in a court of law’, she shouted at me, because obviously by now, I am looking dumber than most of the other folk all staring at me with shocked faces.

‘What pray tell might I do in a court of law’? I asked indignantly.

‘You can sit there and that’s all.’

‘Well, no wonder the world is full of illiterate criminals,’ I bellowed.

And, with that she left me alone as I threw my eye glasses back onto the top of my head and challenged her to arrest me for having four eyes ill equipped to read or write with!

This is a sad state of affairs when the world is more concerned about a fifty-five year old graduate student trying to write her Master’s theses when simply accompanying someone to court for moral support. I should have expected it though, I was a support person for someone convicted of stealing her own stuff, and that didn’t seem to matter to the legal system either...all I saw that day was an institution that has turned into nothing but a revenue generating facility drunk on power.

I remember thinking as I left...I will WRITE ABOUT THIS!