Making the World an even More Disgusting Place

I recently met an attorney who told me that is specialty is traffic.  “Really!” I replied. “That sounds interesting.  Could you give me an example of what you do, and for whom?”

He explained that people who get hefty citations hire him to get their cases dismissed, or have their fines greatly reduced.  He summarized this as follows, “I take money away from local governments, and keep bad drivers on the road.”

Holy crap, I was thinking.  Not everyone is a Mahatma Gandhi or MLK, but should anyone fashion a career out of making the world a more dangerous and degraded place than it already is?

I’ll grant that this is an extreme example. But consider that there are millions of people working in industries like fossil fuels, tobacco, sodas, and building war machines.  Then we have our elected officials whose job it is destroy public education and environmental health, while others work on gerrymandering so as to keep themselves in office and dismantle our democracy.

Sure, the attorney described above has a disgusting profession, but he’s not alone.