My neighborhood was hit hard by the ice storm. We have been without power for eight days now and counting. Some of my neighbours have generators. Some don’t. Some have heat and water. Some do not.
Gary, Rob, and John have cleared downed trees so that people can drive out to the main road. Jack was over at my house with his chainsaw to be sure that I could get out of my driveway. Jim has helped several people get their generators operational or shut them down to check the oil. Jack and Gary helped get my generator started when it conked out, and Brian stored my food in his freezer until my generator was up and running again. I showered at Sara’s house because her generator is larger than mine and she has hot water.
I am fortunate to live in a community where it is clearly more “us” than “me.”
In the face of Trump’s tariffs, many Canadians have cut out travel to the U.S. and are doing their best to buy Canadian products, even when U.S. products are cheaper. We are seeing lots of “us,” and less “me.”
NATO has been a giant “us,” keeping the West safe for many decades. If the “ME”-GA movement succeeds in destroying it, we may feel less safe in the future. The Department of Greed and Evil (DOGE) is not doing much to promote “us” either.
In the U.S., some law firms have taken the “me” approach, and settled with the Trump Administration to save themselves in the face of illegal Executive Orders. Others have defended the Rule of Law at personal risk, and they have done so for “us.”
In our immediate and extended families, there are also “us” people and “me” people. We know who we like better, and who we trust more.
Law firms are a collection of individuals. As you can expect, there are “me” thinkers and “us” thinkers. There are even “me” thinkers who masquerade as “us” thinkers. Some “me” thinkers get themselves chosen as Practice Group Leaders or Managing Partners by selling “us,” but ultimately only “me” and their ilk seem to benefit.
There has traditionally been a great deal of “me” at law firms. Give “me” the most money because of the size of my client base and the amount of my billings. Don’t look too hard at what some of the partners are doing for “us” in the way of management, mentoring, training, and supervising, and other activities which do not show up nearly as clearly in the key performance indicators as do billings and client origination credits.
Although some of my generation may think that “things go better with Coke,” in my experience, thinks really go better with “us,” whether it be a community, a family, a country, an international association, a business, or a law firm. The fact that it seems so obvious that people are happiest when they work together to achieve common goals, makes it so difficult to understand the seemingly inevitable march toward misery that so many Americans are hell-bent upon, at all costs. Here’s hoping that we Canadians do not follow them there.