Philip Rosmarin

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

I heard Luciano Pavarotti sing live only once. It was at the Hatch Shell on the Esplanade along the Charles River in Boston. Scores of thousands of people sat on the grass or stood to hear the greatest voice of the century. Many of them wept openly at the stunning beauty of the sound. I was one of them.

The performance was free and part of it was used in the not terribly brilliant film “Yes, Giorgio!” In a still photo of the outdoor concert scene, I’m the young man in the third row, one hundred eighty-third from the left.

Many didn’t know — because while he had one of the most powerful voices anyone has ever possessed, paradoxically he rarely tooted his own horn — that Pavarotti raised many millions of dollars for suffering children of war-torn countries, that he worked with the United Nations to promote and protect human rights, to protect refugees.

It was his voice that people remember, that I remember. (You can jog your memory here.)

I don’t believe in God, but hearing that man sing, I knew why people do believe in God. When Pavarotti died, thirteen years ago today, although I knew it wasn’t true because there were and would be other voices to remind us of what we call divinity, it felt then as though there was a little less God on this planet Earth.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

I remember the first unarmed black man I saw shot in the back by a white cop.

He was facedown on the street, one arm twisted beneath him, the other flung forward over his head as though trying to grab the pavement to pull himself further from the cop who’d just shot him. So still in the midday light. The hole in his back, south-west of his right shoulder blade, must have shut down his heart at once: it showed barely red at all through his ruined shirt.

At first I thought he must be a car mechanic, the back of his hand black with grease. When they turned him I saw he was black all over.

When I wrote about it I don’t remember it as a big thing: white cop shoots unarmed black man. The cop didn’t know whether he was armed or not; the guy had just robbed a bank and was trying to get away, and in those days — somewhere around 1973 — you shot bank robbers, armed or not, who were trying to get away.

Jacob Blake wasn’t a bank robber trying to get away. He was a father attacked by cops and in stunned shock trying to walk back to the sanctuary of his car and his three young children inside. Followed by a cop with drawn weapon who, when Blake tried to open his door and sit down, grabbed him from behind by his tee shirt and without warning or hesitation shot him seven times in the back. Two seconds to shred his kidneys, liver, stomach, and colon; to sever his spine.

George Floyd wasn’t a bank robber trying to get away. Neither were Rayshard Brooks, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, nor Eric Garner, all and more of whose unjustly taken lives are writ large in these pages.

“America is not a racist country,” Nikki Haley said at the Republican National Convention, urging support for perhaps the most blatant and obvious racist president in the history of the country, who describes neo-Nazi white supremacists as “very fine people,” warns that blacks will infest our suburban white neighborhoods, and tells U.S. Congresswomen of color to go back to the shithole countries from which they came. Who welcomes white neighbors from the north and meets brown ones from the south with a beautiful wall. Who bans Muslims. A nation is personified by its leader: One Nation under Trump is all-in racist.

One Nation Under Trump would have us be asleep to the disproportionate killings, brutality, and arrests of people of color by our police, to simply close our eyes and pretend it isn’t so.

Asleep, we don’t see that Hispanic Americans are nearly twice as likely than white Americans to be killed by police; black Americans about two and a half times as likely. Police in the United States shoot and kill about one thousand people every year. Overwhelmingly, the cops who shoot them face armed threats to their own lives or to the lives of others.

But asleep, we don’t see that thirteen unarmed black men, and one unarmed black woman, were killed by our police last year, and this year’s similar pace is about one unarmed black man or black woman homicide by cop every month.

The Atlantic called Jacob Blake’s shooting a wake-up call.

But how many wake-up calls do we need, before we actually wake up?

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the foundation of international human rights law. Its Article 21 says that one of those human rights is that the will of the people shall be the basis of governmental authority, expressed through free elections by universal and equal suffrage. Universal means everyone of voting age.

It’s astonishing that today marks just one hundred years that women in the United States have nationwide been able to exercise their human right to vote. This country is two hundred forty-four years old. That’s a lot of years of unwoke dudes.

So this year I’m not voting for Joe Biden. I’m not voting for Donald Trump either. I’m voting for Kamala Harris, so that in 2024 — or 2028 if Biden somehow keeps on creakin’ — this man can cast a vote for the first woman President of the United States.

High time.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

I was born without a lick of ambition. I never wanted to be anyone. Never wished I were somebody else. Never envied another’s accomplishments. Admired them, but never envied them.

Twice in grade school I was given the chance to skip up a year; both times I chose to stay with my friends, and I was particularly glad the second time, because that year, the year my mother died, was the best I’d ever had, and then she was gone that summer after. Ambition would have made that year different: she would have missed the eighth-grade graduation she told me she hoped to live to see.

In my senior year of high school, when my father’s employer was moving him out of state yet again, one of my teachers implored me to stay that last semester with her family. She was certain if I did I would get the scholarship to Columbia she had worked to secure for me, but I needed to be there for the interviews she had brokered. I chose my own family. Ambition might have made me think my little sister, and my little brother, didn’t really need me just those last few months.

Months after moving to Boston, where I had dreamed for years of living, I was offered a job writing advertising — in New York. I came for Boston, I told a friend. It’s the best agency in the country, she said. I shrugged. Have you no ambition, she asked in frustration. No, I said, I don’t think I do.

Even my three recalled past lives lack a certain largeness of vision. I was a man who murdered my sister and hid her body in my basement. I was a calvary soldier shot in the back with an arrow as I fled from battle. My best past life? I was a junkyard dog. It was my best because I was the leader of the pack. That’s as grandiose as my recovered memories get.

As a criminal defense lawyer, I never met a client whom I didn’t first consider whether they even needed to be anyone’s client. Whether they needed a lawyer at all. I don’t really get paid when I tell someone: look, this is what’s going to happen to you in court, and it’s going to happen whether you show up with a lawyer or not.

I have testimonials from people who glowingly describe how I helped them get through a criminal crisis without actually being there at all. I have none of their money.

Another good way to get no money, I’ve discovered, is through pro bono work. Every year of my career the Colorado Supreme Court has sent me a very nice certificate commemorating the fact that I haven’t the faintest idea how to make a buck.

My favorite image of what I feel it means to be a man, is of a drunken Taoist poet, lying on his back atop a lovely green hill, literally watching the clouds roll by.

The price of this black hole of ambition?

My wife works harder than she should have to. My children, consciously or not, saw their father’s lack of drive and decided to up their own games. My son works hours I didn’t even know they made that long. My daughter is the hardest working young woman in show business.

Still, if you call me I’ll tell you, without a second’s hesitation, if I don’t think you need a lawyer, and you won’t have to warm up your wallet one bit.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

When John Lewis first crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Alabama state troopers were there on the other side to beat him unconscious.

When he last crossed it, with a little help from his friends, Alabama state troopers were there on the other side to salute him.

All we have left now of the great civil rights icon are his words.

Here are a few of them. It’s only words. But read them anyway.

They can take your heart away.

You are a light. You are the light. Never let anyone – any person or any force – dampen, dim or diminish your light.

Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society.

To those who have said, ‘Be patient and wait,’ we must say that we cannot be patient.  We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now.  We are tired.  We are tired of being beaten by policemen.  We are tired of seeing our people locked up in jail over and over again.

When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something. To do something. Our children and their children will ask us, ‘What did you do? What did you say?’

We have been too quiet for too long. There comes a time when you have to say something. You have to make a little noise. You have to move your feet. This is the time.

Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime.

1957, I met Rosa Parks, at the age of seventeen. In 1958, at the age of eighteen, I met Martin Luther King, Jr. And these two individuals inspired me to get in the way, to get in trouble. You must find a way to get in the way. You must find a way to get in trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble.

We must never ever give up, or give in or throw in the towel. We must continue to press on! And be prepared to do what we can to help educate people, to motivate people, to inspire people to stay engaged, to stay involved and to not lose their sense of hope. We must continue to say we’re one people. We’re one family. We all live in the same house. Not just an American house but the world house. As Dr. King said over and over again, ‘We must learn to live together as brothers and sisters. If not, we will perish as fools.’

My dear friends: Your vote is precious, almost sacred. It is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have to create a more perfect union.

And these, his last, words.

While my time here has now come to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society. Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens of division. Around the country and the world you set aside race, class, age, language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity.

That is why I had to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, though I was admitted to the hospital the following day. I just had to see and feel it for myself that, after many years of silent witness, the truth is still marching on.

Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he was killed, and I was only 15 years old at the time. I will never ever forget the moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me. In those days, fear constrained us like an imaginary prison, and troubling thoughts of potential brutality committed for no understandable reason were the bars.

Though I was surrounded by two loving parents, plenty of brothers, sisters and cousins, their love could not protect me from the unholy oppression waiting just outside that family circle. Unchecked, unrestrained violence and government-sanctioned terror had the power to turn a simple stroll to the store for some Skittles or an innocent morning jog down a lonesome country road into a nightmare. If we are to survive as one unified nation, we must discover what so readily takes root in our hearts that could rob Mother Emanuel Church in South Carolina of her brightest and best, shoot unwitting concertgoers in Las Vegas and choke to death the hopes and dreams of a gifted violinist like Elijah McClain.

Like so many young people today, I was searching for a way out, or some might say a way in, and then I heard the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on an old radio. He was talking about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. He said we are all complicit when we tolerate injustice. He said it is not enough to say it will get better by and by. He said each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.

Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.

You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. People on every continent have stood in your shoes, through decades and centuries before you. The truth does not change, and that is why the answers worked out long ago can help you find solutions to the challenges of our time. Continue to build union between movements stretching across the globe because we must put away our willingness to profit from the exploitation of others.

Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.

When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war. So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.

See you in November.