emo moss

Another one!! I just love Rock Lee as a father 😭❤️

On a flight to LA I struck up a conversation with the woman sitting next to me, idle chitchat while we waited for the plane to take off. In the air my husband pulled out a book, but the light above his seat was broken. Our new friend in the window seat insisted on loaning him her travel book-light. Shortly after, I pulled out my kindle on which I was reading Everything Is Tuburculosis. It opened on a particularly medical page. She asked if I was studying for med school. I explained what the book is about, and she was fascinated. A minute later she asked "Since I finished my book in the airport and I can't get my phone on the wifi, would you be offended if I read your book with you? I can see from here just fine."

And so for the next 2.5 hours or so this stranger and I quietly read your book side by side. Our reading pace was (thankfully) the same and every now and then she would silently point to something she found especially poignant or whisper a quiet "Wow" or "I never knew that."

For a few hours your book gave a strange sense of human connection to this childless 29 year old from CT on her way to a Bat Mitzvah in LA and a 60-some year old woman from Romania going to visit her daughter in Denver.

At the end of the flight she wrote down "John Green" in the notes app on her phone so she can finish the book, and get a copy for her daughter too.

"After they overheard that ICE was at the courthouse to arrest someone, they improperly accessed court databases to determine who was not born in the United States," a DOJ detention filing says. "They then snuck every suspected illegal alien who was at the courthouse out a back door, where ICE, who was waiting in the parking lot for their target to leave the building, could not see them."

I get a lot of versions of this question, and I answer it seriously every time, because it’s both important and not important at all. Anyone who asks respectfully gets my whole ass answer.

It’s just not really about that. My job isn’t about defending the idea of hurting someone else. It’s about stopping the state from inflicting further hurt, torture, pain. It’s about pushing back for some fairness against a monumentally stacked system. And it’s about stuff that’s normal human stuff that counts as crime for some reason.

Yeah, it’s hard to do a sex abuse case. Sometimes the images stick around and it bothers me. But honestly? Mostly those cases have real plausible theories of innocence or they’re cases that I will lose because the evidence is there, and the question is not whether the perpetrator will go to jail but how long.

Those cases are so rare, though. I get so much pointless bullshit. Felony of a teen taking mom’s car without permission. Two kids that try to break into a car and get so scared by the alarm that they run away. Trespassing on dad’s house because his new girlfriend wants you to stop coming around. It’s just human stuff, and the violence of the state is not necessary or helpful.

I also reject the idea of punishment completely. The state has a responsibility to stop people from hurting other people again. But inflicting pain doesn’t do it, we know this by now. So I argue for mercy and for real solutions to real problems. I’m here to build a future, not get caught up with doing violence to someone because of the past.

So yeah, sometimes it’s hard, but mostly my conscience is dead clear: I’m not responsible for the crime. The damage has been done. I want to start the healing process, and I want it for everyone involved. When that’s not possible, I just want to tell the authorities they don’t get to just Do What They Want.

The more I do this job, the more I am a genuine pacifist who is against violence in all forms, and actually I don’t see a contradiction between that and what I do for a living. State violence is a pervasive evil that tears apart families, communities, and countries, and it’s far more damaging and awful than any individual crime. The average prosecutor has more blood on their hands than a serial killer, but it’s invisible: people who died in jail, who froze to death on the street, who were shot in a drug deal. Their violence begets violence.

When I get blood on my hands, it’s because I put my hands over the wounds and try to stop the flow. I’m okay with it.