When we think someone’s behaving like a jerk, no matter how jerky, we should treat them like we would a child who did the wrong thing and didn’t know any better: with love and justice.    

∞

I got that dirt dawg in me, and I brought that mentality to the courtroom in my lawyer days. I rocked it like a Ruff Ryder, and even listened to DMX, the top dog dirt dawg, bless his soul, before court to hype myself up to cope with the corporatism that controls that kangaroo con job.

As I wrote in my first book, Human Justice, almost everyone in the law game hated my guts, especially the lawyers on the other side who defended the corporations I sued.

The lawyer I annoyed the most was on the other side in the case I centered Human Justice around. We’re a lot alike, and that’s at the core of why he couldn’t stand me. He’s also a dirt dawg warrior, and as adversaries, we focused on the stuff we saw in the other one that we didn’t love in ourselves. 

He thought I was a badass for taking on the corporations and their armies of lawyers by myself and often getting the best of them. Watching me Ruff Ryde made him feel like a sellout and a fraud.

I thought I was better than him because he worked for the man, while I got justice for the people. Watching him delay cases to bill hours and make money off my clients’ harms made me feel greedy about taking 40% in fees out of my clients’ recoveries in every case. They needed that money way more to pay for stuff like rent and food than I did to maintain my bougie lifestyle, and I felt like a sellout and a fraud.

That lawyer and I might have been brothers-in-arms in another life, and we probably were because I just thought about it. But in this three-dimensional experience we’re sharing, we don’t bring out the best in each other.

Long legal battles lasting for years in multiple cases made us frequent sparring partners. We respected each other more and liked each other less with each new case. The one in Human Justice was where things came to a head, and we finally squared off in trial after several false starts in other cases. 

On his end, things got personal, and the silly stunts that went down in that case were way over the top. I covered how it went in the book. He viewed me as a semi-major boss from a semi-violent video game where you kill monster bosses. Like the Maui from Moana of video game monster bosses, only if Maui was a monster, and not a demi-God.

On my end, I wasn’t into being a lawyer anymore. I just wanted to get justice for my broke, desperate client and do one last legally brown, ca$h money boogie.

I didn’t shake his hand after trial when he offered it, and I left him hanging in front of everyone inside the courtroom. I felt bad about doing that until I saw how things went for Kamala after she pressed flesh with Trump before their debate. I get the social significance of handshakes, but I felt an aversion to touching that man on a soul level, and I’ve learned to trust my body.

Recently, I saw him out and about at a non-lawyer event, which I do from time to time because we’re a lot alike and enjoy similar stuff. We didn’t make eye contact, but I know he felt my presence. The notion of touching him didn’t seem gross anymore, and I thought about stepping up and asking to shake his hand to close that energetic loop.

But I didn’t do that. Instead, I kept it moving.

I know how my man gets down. He’s all about the corporation and he’s mega good at his job: protecting the money from the barbarians at all costs. I ain’t got no time for low vibrating stuff like that. It’s vibrationally repulsive.

Even though I think my man’s about stuff that’s trash, I still see myself in him, so I love him. And I can love him from a distance and honor that love with galactic justice by staying far, far away.

The mutual alien ancestors we share that I sometimes blurp about, the Dogon from the Sirius quadrant of the galaxy, would be proud of us for keeping it moving and keeping it loving.

Sometimes, treating someone with love and justice means giving them space to breathe, especially when there’s a vibrational mismatch.