What is justice? II

My thinking about what is justice comes from a combination of many things. There is what justice means, whether it is possible to find in life, and should it be fought to attain? The questions go behind legal systems to all of life. It also recognizes that people see what it is very differently often based on their culture but maybe other things.

One example that leaps to my mind was the Koran burning and its aftermath. That had human injustice written all over it at every possible end. An American freaky pastor decides burning a Koran is what he must do. That alone is filled with injustice as why attempt to desecrate what is holy to someone else? It makes no sense, does it? His personal sense of justice requires him desecrating that of others?

Then you get the president of Afghanistan discussing it when American media had deliberately not covered it for obvious reasons-- it wasn't news. What possible justice was the leader of Afghanistan hoping to provoke?

Well he proved that not only were some Americans savages, and frankly that is how I define what that pastor and anyone who supports him did, but also some Afghanis. They attacked the UN compound, killed twelve people there who had absolutely nothing to do with burning their holy book and I guess called that justice.

Then there is our legal system. What Obama ordered done by saying we cannot try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in a civil court says something important about our whole justice system and for once the Republican leaders and our Democratic president are in agreement-- except it's the wrong thing they agree on. If we cannot try accused terrorists in our public courts, who can we try fairly? Does it mean our system is faulty? Ask yourself what that means about justice in this country.

If you look at life, pretty much any aspect of it, finding justice can be in short supply. Is there justice in nature? It might be biological, but is it just? Nature, unless you are as nutty as the Koran burning pastor, just does what it does, which is usually reacting to balancing something else. You could have spent your whole life doing all the right things, following all the rules, but that earthquake, tsunami, or the cougar waiting in a tree, none of it cares. It might be balance but the word justice doesn't fit with it. There is no negotiating with nature. Justice, unless you want to think everything nature does is necessarily just because it doesn't have a personality behind it, doesn't apply to nature. I know there are those who want to force it into that mold-- god did it-- but that thinking simply doesn't work for me (with one possible exception which I'll get to later).

In a lot of life, justice seems in short supply. Yes, sometimes we do reap what we sow. Some diseases are like that. Some relationships, but we are born into a particular family. We maybe have certain genetic weaknesses built into us-- how does justice fit into that? It simply is what it is.

That's what my friend and I discussed the other day without using the word justice. We both talked of our knowing we had been born into nurturing, protective families. It's not like that meant we never had problems, nor that our families were perfect, but it means we understood our luck as it's not that way with all babies. We don't really deserve our families when we are born, do we?

That day, she and I talked of many things that had happened in our lives, in our community through the years. We could see that yes, some people had reaped what they had sown. For others, it was just the luck of the draw. The rain falls on the just and unjust.

The one exception to all of this would be if there is reincarnation, which I can't say is true or not. Reincarnation and karma would mean there is cosmic justice and eventually what goes around, comes around. It is, in my opinion, the only way there could be justice in life. It's not so much that I'd like to think we live again as it is I'd like to think there was cosmic justice of the real sort. In a lot of ways it would mean what happens to us makes sense and has purpose.

If there is not reincarnation, if this is a heaven-or-hell earth or a dust-to-dust one, then justice is not part of what happens here. The very idea that saying some words that give a get out of jail card for doing the things some humans do to others, well it will only be seen as justice by someone desperate to twist it into that form and fearful of saying that religion's god wasn't always just.

Now this all doesn't depress me (other than what my government does) as some might think I am heading toward saying. It's just a fact. We live with what is and getting all upset at the idea of there being justice, worried when we see it's not working out, well to me that's a waste of energy.

However, as individuals, we still try to live our own lives justly. We can do what we can to make sure our own culture is just in how it treats people. We do that all for many reasons which go beyond hoping to get a payback for it. We try for it because it's a better way to live and maybe that's the only way the world at large (excluding nature) will be a place of human justice at least.

Living that way though has a complexity built into it. What if someone decides that to be just means they burn someone else's holy book? What if their idea of living justly is to kill strangers because someone, thousands of miles away, burned a book holy to them?

There needs to be a lot more teaching about what real human justice is, what a country should have in the way of laws and enforcing of them, a legal code that means they can and will try any accused criminal in an open courtroom. If we can't do that, what exactly do we have in a sense of communal justice?

I have said I am not religious but there is an idea, taught in many religions that fits a way of living that would come as close as I think is possible to yielding justice-- treat others as we would like to be treated. It's at least a start.