What I Think About What Other People Say (WITAWOPS)

For the fourth time (and the second time this year), I was privileged to be a part of a loved one’s transition from this worldly life and offer support to the family left behind. Being the intellectually curious person I am (and given this blog’s name), I found, in all four experiences, moments of distraction. Opportunities to set aside the realities of what all of us were feeling and experiencing and instead focus on individual articulations, faith, and actions.  Image by freepix.com Who and Where While only an infinitesimal fraction of what hospital staff, clergy, and many others have experienced, my four experiences constitute my entire universe. It’s all I have to go with. Three were in the U.S. Two were seniors (over 75) while the other two were under 40. One was Christian, the others Muslim. Three had long-term serious underlying causes; they had visibly suffered for most of the years that I had known them. All four passed in a hospital, under the care of experienced, profess...

“Why is your husband rude, aloof, and anti-social? I called out to him at our community center and he ignored me”. What Do I Think?  I often feel antisocial, aloof, and alone in noisy, crowded spaces. It’s not by choice—I have a disability that makes these situations incredibly difficult. For a long time, I thought I was the only one until I discovered a Facebook group of 5,400 others with the same condition: Single-Sided Deafness (SSD) . For many of us, this condition came on suddenly and without explanation. My right ear stopped functioning between 2 and 4 a.m. on July 1, 2012. The cause? Idiopathic—medical jargon for “we have no clue.” Image by www.freepik.com One member of the Facebook group summarized our shared struggles perfectly: “No one can see the fact that I have no idea who is talking to me or where any sound is coming from. No one can see how hard my brain is working to make sense of what I hear. No one can see how exhausted I am.” Single-Sided Deafness often comes wi...

  “You should not surrender your honest convictions about the value or significance of evidence solely because of the opinions of your fellow jurors. Nor should you change your mind just for the purpose of obtaining enough votes for a verdict…As jurors, you are officers of this court. You must not let your emotions overcome your rational thought process. You must reach your decision based on the facts provided to you and on the law given to you, not on sympathy, prejudice, or personal preference.” -- Instructions to King County jurors in a civil case, 2020. What do I think On the surface, the American jury seems, frankly, absurd. Why should a random group of citizens—without specialized knowledge of law or the specific field at hand—be tasked with deciding someone’s fate in a court of law? What could a jury of laypeople know about the nuances of the legal system and the technicalities of cases involving medicine, education, environmental policy, or other complex areas? How can they...