I know Cox chiefly through eminent domain litigation I've been involved with. We also have debated politics a bit. I figured out pretty quickly that Cox likes to say outrageous things to provoke a response and stir debate. It would be a mistake to take some of his pronouncements - such as using live ammunition on protesters - as serious.
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| Carlos Lam |
I met Carlos Lam through Republican politics. Carlos, who is a long-time Washington Township Republican party worker, is an "idea guy," a person who is constantly considering various ways of approaching issues from a conservative political viewpoint. While many of Carlos' ideas are good, others like the "false flag" idea shouldn't see the light of day.
Both Cox and Lam are very intelligent young men. Unfortunately both are victims of the new media, the era of instant communication...email, twitter, Facebook, etc, in which thoughts can be quickly memorialized into writing,
In the "old days" if you had an idea you wanted to communicate you'd sit down and write a formal letter. Crafting the letter takes time which allows for reflection. Once you wrote the letter, you would still have to track down an address, affix postage, and take the envelope to the mailbox. Those of us who remember writing formal letters - as opposed to email - have experienced times when we have, on further reflection, decided against sending the letter. With email that time for reflection has been reduced to a fraction of what it used to be. With twitter the bridge between thought and publication is an extremely short one.
While the advantages of instant communications are substantial, there is definitely a downside. It reduces thoughts more quickly into the written word...which then be taken out of context and/or misrepresented and used against the writer.
God forbid that every thought that enters our head becomes published, a permanent record of our lives. Yet we are coming closer to that every day.
What bothers me most about the Cox and Lam incident is that both attorneys had comfortable public sector jobs with good salaries and benefits that they suddenly lost Those jobs are highly sought after by attorneys. It is no slam dunk that they can go into the private sector, oversatured with attorneys willing to work long hours for $35,000 a year and no benefits, and get a comparable job.
I certainly wish Carlos Lam and Jeff Cox the best as their careers move forward. They're both good men whose life's work should not be judged on the basis of couple bad ideas made turned into public fodder.