Here Come The Judge Or You, Too, Can Be Judgmental!
Posted: Saturday, September 24, 2011
by Octavia Hansen
Octavia Hansen
Judges fascinate me. I'm not entirely sure what constitutes a judge, the exact qualifications. Some are elected. Some are appointed. The must be a lot of research and law behind it. Since they hold power over people's lives, there must be something to make them better at judging than others.
There are judges on game shows, dance shows, singing shows, and even Jeopardy has a panel of judges who review the answers and sometimes rule differently to change the scores. Celebrity judges are scary. Most are not qualified to rate as a celebrity, yet they hold the balance of some act or future in their hands. From their picks and tosses, I wouldn't trust them to judge a dinner menu.
In old films of Mickey Rooney, Andy Hardy's dad was a judge, though for what I saw, he handled the kids, the house and everyone's life so badly, I wouldn't trust a sentence from him.
Perry Mason was always before a judge, much like Matlock and the firm in Boston Legal, but the judges might as well be cardboard. Do you remember any of them, or anything they said besides "Overruled" or "Sustained."?
Have you met any judges? None of my friends had judges for dads, none of my gal friends became or married a judge, no one I ever met had the goal of becoming a judge. I don't know where they hang out. I have never had the privilege of talking to one. Maybe this is a good thing. If a judge figures prominently in your life, it probably coincides with a run-in with the law.
I've lost a lot of faith in the Supreme Court. When the Supreme Court recently blocked a massive sex discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart on behalf of female employees, there was no justice. How dare they! How could they? The decision was split Republicans and Democrats, men and women -- good judgement went right out the window -- it became purely a political issue. I always thought of them as fossils before, now I consider them puppets.
Olympic judges have also lost a lot of ground over the years making bad decisions and getting caught at bribery for locations. The Olympic committee was charged with taking bribes to hold the games in specific cities, it was proven, and the games went on as usual in those cities. Guess it worked. The actual judges for competitions are not hard to figure out, either. Germany votes for Germans, Japan votes for Japanese. So much for wise decisions based on talent and qualifications. The games are supposed to be non-political, athletes coming together for pure sport. The judges are supposed to be people from whatever sport they are judging, experts in the field, so to speak, so they know of which they speak. At least the clock tells the truth, everything else I question.
But I have always fancied the Olympic scoring system where they hold up numbers on large cards. This can work in other areas of life. A few years ago, a close friend of mine and I decided we would be judges. It was a year of the Summer Olympics and we have a great sense of humor. Everywhere we went, we took lawn chairs, ice chest and big number cards. We would wait out traffic jams, parking lots, city parks, places we could sit and judge. Nice running -- 7.8; ugly dog -- 2.3; friendly attitude -- 9.9; when we sat by watching a marathon, everybody got a 69 -- what else? When people laughed, we knew we were doing it right.
Follow our example -- every day can be judgement day!
This Article has been viewed 168 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
No comments yet.We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.