Justice Shrugged

The Transformative Way

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.