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Growing Old

I Care A Lot was one of the most disturbing movies I have seen in a while. Having seen family court in action in the lives of a few of my close friends, the robotic legal system  devoid of any commonsense is very familiar. It facilitates the use of the court order as weapon by those who know how to game the system. Marla Grayson in the movie is one of those - likely inspired by true horror stories of elder abuse. The lack of checks and balances is taken to hyperbolic proportion in the movie but it is a very reasonable caricature of the system. One of my friends calls having to go to family court to resolve domestic disputes like being forced to a porta-potty in an overcrowded venue. If you can hold it you don't go use one but if you end up having no choice, there is no point complaining about the overflowing filth, no water and no toilet paper.

It's the price you pay for not being able to resolve your differences in a more sanitary venue, not being able to hold off going to the bathroom. L's experience has been nightmarish and fundamentally altered the course of her life. At close to sixty she finds herself having to start over - that long dreamed of retirement will never happen for her. The one consistent theme of her legal woes was that of a system that cannot simply handle the complexity of the human condition. Every deviation from the "standard" comes at a price. The greater the number of deviations, the exponentially worse the outcomes.  At some point the tag is high enough to leave a person materially and emotionally decimated. 

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