The older I get, the younger I don’t feel. Any time I think about living in an apartment, whenever I hear some noise or music, I think..maybe we should get a house someday. And then I think, in an apartment they fix the..pretty well everything that malfunctions. The refrigerator, A/C, plumbing, washer/dryer, and in an apartment, I am not expected, as a recovering cancer patient myself, to do the lawn.
When I see the lawn professionals, I do offer them fresh bottles of water, but that is the extent of my involvement with lawns. Now I did not know there was even a thing as having to face a judge for a lawn that was unkempt, but I also did not know there was such a thing as a judge that did not take context into consideration. Understanding context is integral to being a judge right? Or am I just being naive?
A Michigan judge berated a 72-year-old man on Monday after he told her he had failed to keep up with the maintenance of his yard because his cancer treatments made him very weak. In a video of the exchange, Burhan Chowdhury, of Hamtramck, Michigan, can be heard struggling to breathe as he explained his situation to 31st District Judge Alexis G. Krot. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” Krot could be heard saying in the video. “If I could give you jail time on this, I would.”
Shibbir Chowdhury told The Washington Post that his father was diagnosed with lymph node cancer in 2019. He said he usually helps keep up the yard for his parents, but he was out of the country in Bangladesh for three months last year.
He said the weeds grew out around his parents’ house while he was gone. When he returned, his father told him they had received a ticket for noxious weeds and vegetation. Shibbir Chowdhury said he was shocked by the judge’s reaction to the situation. “She was telling my father, a sick person, that he should go to jail. That’s ridiculous,” he told The Post. “You can’t give a 72-year-old person jail time for not cleaning an alley.”
This judge was appointed in 2016 by Republican Governor Rick Snyder, and then elected in 2018.
I took a few moments to read the Twitter replies. Like nearly always, a noxious cesspool. And I am sure none of this attitude has to do with the family ancestry, no not at all.
As someone who has been really sick, I can tell you that they could become a friggin jungle gym, Tarzan himself could land on my roof, and Lemurs could tap on my window and it would not have mattered. And that was with Covid. While I am not exactly sure if chemo is a factor here, if it is that is well known to be a whole other waking nightmare. But if the neighbors were so awful worried about it, they could, I don’t know, knock on a door and check in on the man. They could pool together resources to help the man with the lawn. They could show some concern.
In an ideal world, yes this frail elderly man would have had the resources or the physical strength to maintain this lawn.
In an ideal world this gentleman would not have cancer. In an ideal world we would have fewer judges that lack empathy.
In an ideal world neighbors would band together.
And in an ideal world we as a species when faced with such circumstances would reach for solutions not blame. But in this world, punching down is the only thing that seems to validate too many people.
We don’t have a weeds problem. We have an empathy problem. And overgrown weeds inside of one’s heart are proving much harder to clear, than a lawn of a cancer patient.
-ROC
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-ROC