An Invisible Client

by Victor Methos

Justice will not come until those who are not injured are as outraged as those who are. — Solon, 560 BC

Under the law, a person was valued at exactly how much money that person could earn. Anyone who hadn’t gone to an Ivy League school, pulled in at least six figures, or had a family business waiting for them was what PI lawyers called “an invisible client”—one who lived and breathed but didn’t officially exist.

“The world’s always been a mess. You can’t change that. You just have to straighten out your little corner of it.”

“That’s the beauty of poetry,” I said. “That language is inadequate to describe life. So poetry just tries to bring up emotions. Just read it and see how you feel. If you feel something, then the poem worked.”

“What’s it feel like to kiss a girl?” Joel asked. I grinned. “It’s like . . . if you take everything fun that’s ever happened to you and you wrap it up in a ball and put it on your lips, that’s what it feels like. You can feel her heart beating against yours, and it seems like the rest of the world disappears. You don’t remember what you have to do tomorrow or anything like that. It’s just you and her.”

When you give up, it’s not yourself you hurt the worst. It’s everybody who cares about you.

The people who love you and look up to you are your power, not the money.

Like Oscar Wilde said, the poor in America don’t think of themselves as a repressed lower class, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

“The most powerful corporations and banks hire the most expensive lobbyists, who buy the votes of the most powerful politicians. Capitalism is a free exchange between two entities without the use of force. That’s not what we have anymore. The word for what we have is oligarchy. It means that we are ruled by a few powerful people. Our system is rigged, and the people who benefit are the richest corporations. The White House and Congress are our symbols of freedom and leadership, but that’s all they are: symbols. The richest corporations lead us.

We’re taught from an early age by advertising agencies that we’re only as good as the wealth we have. It isn’t true. We’re not their slaves. We’re people. We’re not numbers on a spreadsheet. We aren’t disposable if we don’t make enough. This is our country, not theirs.

Plato wrote that the gods were jealous of man’s powers after the days of creation, that we had four arms and four legs and two heads, and were full of love and intelligence and grit, so they split us in half and threw our halves all around the earth. The point of life, then, is to find your other half and become whole again. The tragedy of life is if you find them and don’t hold on.”