Justice Shrugged
I drifted along for years mindlessly secure in my privileged life
convinced that traditional justice was doing its job. But now at this
agonizing moment in our nation’s history I am shocked into
painful awareness as I watch wave after wave of social and
economic injustice washing up on the shores of our nation
unattended: mass shootings that keep piling up one after the other
so often that our communal conscience has become indifferent
and we have become compliant as our representatives in Congress
continue to do… nothing.
My initial wake-up moment was the brutal murder of George Floyd
by an armed, licensed, angry and racist police officer. I became
even more awake and alarmed when the United States Capital was
stormed by a coalition of armed white supremacists: Proud Boys
nationalists, Oath Keepers, and a scattering of naïve and misguided
religious fundamentalists, all of whom were encouraged to storm
the Capital by a sitting President of the United States.
How have we as a nation come to this agonizing moment?
How can a supposedly enlightened ‘government established under God’
continue to ignore the manifest racial and economic injustice
of this dreadful moment? We need look no further than yesterday’s news
as confirmation that traditional patriarchal justice has a disturbing
history as administered over time by patriarchs of Church and State.
It’s a justice system that routinely ignores obvious acts of moral and
ethical behavior with one eye, while the other eye is firmly focused on
political and religious self-interest.
We need to re-interpret the meaning of the words ‘Enlightened’ and
‘Under God’ as enshrined in the Constitution of the United States. These
same words are also enshrined in the constitutions of most of our States.
I hope that from the dark nexus of this agonizing moment in our nation’s history
that a new and compassionate understanding of both Legislative and
Distributary justice will emerge.