JOINING THE GREAT CHURCH OF UNIFORMITY. I’ve tried to impress on the unimpressionable that the power of each individual is in his or her uniqueness. When our uniqueness is fully discovered and launched, we are indomitable. But we have no ears for simple truths. Instead we worship in the Church of Uniformity into which, from our earliest days, we were herded by our parents and peers. Over a lifetime we’ve become indoctrinated with the idea that sameness is blessed. We aspire to become like the role models dangled before us—Barbie dolls for little girls and, after they travel beyond puberty, the anorexic models of the glamor magazines. The Ralph Lauren Polo emblem adorns our jockey shorts, and we must lug Louis Vuitton luggage, even though its design is as artistically defunct as gravel.
Ours is a society that demands sameness. We are transformed into uniform products that consume uniform products; our craving for sameness is essential to keep the social machine running. In high school and college we are educated in order to convert our unique beauty into spare parts for the system—the massive machine out there needs administrators, engineers, accountants, designers, computer experts, workers, and lawyers. Like all spare parts we must be uniform in order to fit smoothly into the machine without any disruption when an old part gives out.
Television tells us what makes us happy and what our goals in life should be—especially how we should spend our money. This voice, the voice of power, tells us who we should hate and for what causes our children should die. In passing, we lose even a vague suspicion of our own uniqueness. Most people I know (although they vehemently deny it) want to be like others—to fit in. They want to talk the current lingo, walk in hip shoes, belong to the right clubs, play golf, and drive a BMW. They want to know the up-there people, say the smart things at those deadly stand-up cocktail parties, smile when they should, and say nothing that could possibly be interpreted as antisocial, and, God forbid, mutter not a word that contradicts conventional wisdom. They want to be politically correct and socially acceptable, despite the fact that to do so they may trade that which is right for that which is convenient, painless, and mindless. In short, too many of us have given up the perfect self to become a phony imitation of others.
Conformity in our looks (our fifty-dollar haircuts and two-hundred-dollar sunglasses), our dress (the latest designer “worn out” jeans), our thought (patriotism is supporting our nation’s latest war), and our values (money above all others) have become the standards set for us by those in power. We demand to be like others and discount ourselves when we fail. If we are seen as different we become alarmed and our viscera begin to cramp. Will we be rejected as “strange” or “weird”? Being different is an abysmal appellation, so some pierce their tongues, their navels, their ears, and whatever else, in order to become the same in their difference. We wish the protection of our kind just as zebras appear safer within the herd because they all wear the same black-and-white stripes.
There are innumerable ways to murder a person, but the most subtle and pernicious of these is to mutilate the soul of the innocent by denying or downgrading their uniqueness and their beauty. That crime was long ago committed against most of us when we were too young to defend ourselves against the cruel assaults leveled against us in the name of the proper rearing of children.
From the beginning we’ve been compared to each other. We compete for grades, for places on the football team, or for a part in the school play. We are tested throughout our school experience and rated against national averages in order to enter college. Law schools administer the LSAT, and if we do not measure up we are cast out.
As taught by tyrannical political correctness, we strive to disavow our prejudices, even though they cast their murky shadows on our souls. In accordance with its commands we wave the flag along with the mob of flag wavers, despite the fact that we’re not sure the actions of our country are just. The plague of sameness has stricken us all so that we dare not walk out our front doors without checking to see that we will be accepted into the bleating herd.
The lesson of the thumbs. I say look at your thumbs. Do you see that they have a print, one that is different from any other thumbprint in the world, different from any print of any human being who has ever walked the face of this earth and distinct from any print of any who will ever grace this earth again? Your thumbprint is utterly individual to you. Why, then, can’t we understand that our very essence as persons, let us say our souls, is also unique among all other living human beings and among all those who shall ever in the future take a breath?
One of my great joys is to discover the differences I see in myself as well as the differences I observe in every other human being I encounter. Although we are the same in countless ways, we are, nevertheless, as different from one another as diamonds from rubies, which makes each stone unique, beautiful, and valuable. Since we are not the same, since each of us is different from all others, we cannot be compared, and therefore each of us is perfect.
We can become the person of our dreams only when we recognize that our uniqueness is the most powerful asset we can envision and that the dream must be of our perfect selves. Our blessed differences come popping out of our DNA crying to be recognized and appreciated. Our uniqueness is the greatest gift of our creation. But by the time we are ready to assert ourselves on the world, our beauty has been mostly drowned in the baptismal waters into which the Church of Uniformity has immersed us.
I am saddened when I see lawyers try to imitate other lawyers. To try to be like someone else is like taking a perfect pearl to a pawn broker with the thought of trading it for a phony replica of the Hope Diamond. This is the very motive behind celebrity endorsements of today’s widely advertised products. When Michael Jordan embraces Nike shoes, Nike is saying, “Maybe you can be a little bit like Michael Jordan if you will plunk down a couple of bills to buy our shoes.” I have tried to avoid joining the masses of the walking dead who, attempting to be alive, imitate each other and in the process give up their own lives.
A person’s power in the courtroom or the boardroom, and a salesperson’s ability to make the sale, emerges from his or her uniqueness. The storming orator can be vanquished easily by one who stands before the decision maker and is wholly himself. The other day I sat observing a lawyer in court. He was smallish, with a potbelly and a bald head, that little rim of hair around the sides cut so short that his large ears looked like saucers. His feet pointed out like a duck’s. He wore glasses that balanced precariously on a bulbous nose. He blinked a lot when he talked, and his voice was diminutive and scratchy. Yet there was a power in his presence. Despite the fact that he seemed timid and stiff, he also seemed satisfied with who he was and unaware of what most would consider his glaring deficits. One soon forgot that he didn’t look like he’d just jumped out of GQ. His clothes were ill-fitting and cheap. But the lawyer’s presence and style threatened no one on the jury or in the courtroom, and he was obviously and genuinely intransigent in his belief that his cause was just.
I began to admire this little man’s courage. Once in a while a small amount of humor, mostly a distant chuckle at himself, would slip out. His vulnerability was palpable. I began to like him very much, to pull for him; and I saw how unique he was, this man with the big heart and the unself-conscious smile and an attractiveness that no movie star could have matched. Of course, he won his case.
After the trial I talked with him. He was representing a parent who had wrongfully been accused of child abuse, and as he talked the tears returned to his eyes. He fought them back.
“The worst thing that can happen to a father is to be charged with hurting his child when he’s innocent. Innocent!” he said again. The tears returned. He was talking to me, not the jury.
“You have a lot of power,” I said.
He looked at me, surprised. “Power?” He seemed so fragile.
“Yes,” I said. “It comes out of caring. Caring is contagious,” as I have said so often. “And it comes out of something else. I think you appreciate who you are.
He gave me a quizzical look. Then he nodded and said, “I’m all I got. And it’s enough.” He couldn’t have asked for more.
Vision, the magical door. If I could give one gift to each of you, it would be a vision of what you might become if only your unique self could be fully discovered and appreciated. I was given that gift by my parents and by certain sainted teachers. But the vision can be destroyed, smashed by one careless statement. Our psyches are fragile things and need to be cared for with great tenderness. I remember Velma Linford, my speech teacher in high school, telling me I had a beautiful voice, when she must have been observing her own vision of what that screechy, adolescent voice might one day become. But I adopted her vision, and later took voice lessons and considered the possibility of becoming an opera singer.
Judge Franklin B. Sheldon, who used to skin me alive from the bench when I was a beginning lawyer, once took me into chambers and said, “Someday you’ll become a great trial lawyer.” He had his own vision of how this fumbling, frightened beginner might develop, and he shared it with me.
I also remember a certain judge who, during his critique of my law school mock trial, told me, “You’ll never become a trial lawyer, Mr. Spence. You just as well give that up right now and look for something more attuned to your talents—examining real estate abstracts or something like that.” For a long time his cruel assessment haunted me, for, young or old, we are prone to cultivate as our own the visions that others plant in us.
But the visions my parents shared with me as a child survived, and later so did those of my wife, Imaging. I could do anything that I set my mind to. I’d decided to become a successful trial lawyer. Later, my literary agent, Peter Lampack, shared his vision with me concerning my writing. He thought that down the line I might become a successful author. I have been blessed with the kindness and vision of caring people. And as for that crusty old judge who cast me into the gloomy pits—I knew him. He had never been of much account in the courtroom himself and was eager to withhold the possibility of success from anyone else. Those kind often sit in high authority, but sodden in low self-esteem, and are secretly elated when those around them fail.
I think of the woman who had a three-year-old child named Betsy. The child was born blind. The woman was of a well-known religious order. She said, “You know, children are born with original sin. They don’t know the difference between right and wrong. I have a belt in the closet I use on Betsy for that purpose.” The mother, not the child, was blind. And the original sin was not Betsy’s. That kind of parent is a danger to the human race. They’re destroyers of visions. Visions, especially a child’s vision, have the power to magically change the child, to pull up the blinds and throw open the door to the wonderful possibilities that life offers each of us.
Whether or not we’ve been gifted with splendid visions from others, we are, at last, caretakers of our own visions. One day I heard a lawyer say, “I am annoyed when I look at myself.” After he had spent some days at Trial Lawyer’s College, I heard the same lawyer speak of a new hope. “I’m a coward,” he said. “But I’m finding the courage to be myself.” To throw off old, wrongly transplanted ideas of the self and begin to search for the unique, perfect self does require courage. But it’s a courage we all possess.
In my case, I knew no lawyers to emulate, not in the small, wayside town of Riverton, Wyoming, a hundred miles from nowhere. I had to manufacture my own vision of what a lawyer should be. I thought for a while he should talk like Franklin D. Roosevelt, but that didn’t work very well in Wyoming. Somehow, over the years I’ve learned that the perfect vision of the self is the self, an ever-changing vision as I grew, one that I’ve been struggling to achieve for more than these seven and a half decades. And I suggest to you that your best vision, too, is the incomparable, inimitable, genuine you.
So, we are about to enter the courtroom or the office of, say, the customer. We will take into that place the most powerful person there. This person has no great, spreading-oak-tree biceps, nor the glamor of the current ga-ga girl of films. We will bring in the real person—the one with whom we’ve become acquainted—the one with all the warts, the fears, the humbleness of a genuine person, the caring person emitting the shining light of credibility. We will bring in a person who tells the truth even when the truth seems hurtful. We, the genuine person who has shaken off all of the pretenses, all the efforts to become like someone else, who has begun the long road to self-discovery, will be unconquerable because the power is in our uniqueness. Such a person is believed because, at last, a genuine person is believable.