Plain Right

Let's talk about justice!

Here at Real Change we are always talking about justice, but do we know what it is? My answer to that question is, who cares? All I care about is if I know what justice is.

Upon close examination and careful study and other redundant picking about of that last question, I realize that answering it is problematical, and hinges a lot on what "knowing" is. If by "knowing" a thing, I can mean I "know" what it isn't, well, then I am really on top of this justice thing. For example, justice is not a number 2 pencil. Nor is it an egg salad sandwich or a Ford Bronco or a genetically engineered grapefruit. Whereas, if to "know" a thing, I have to actually "know" what it is, I could easily be in over my head.

Part of what confuses me about justice is that I get it all mixed up with righteousness. I notice that I'm not the only one who does this. Perhaps that's where I should start.

Instead, I'm going to start with an idea of righteousness that was inculcated in me at the malleable age of three. At that age I had been wronged considerably by someone and I desperately needed to understand how that could be. An informal teacher of mine then taught me a concept that he wrapped in his own language, which concept he translated into English as "standing up happens."

Notice what he didn't say: he didn't say "sh*t happens, get used to it." What he also didn't say was, "God will set things right some day and slay your enemies; yea, verily, unto the seven times seventh generation of your enemies will He slay them." He said that whatever people are made to lie down will stand up. He said the rest of us have basically three choices. We can either help the fallen get to their feet, or we can be in the way, or we can be utterly irrelevant. But the standing up will happen. Get used to it. Standing up is a force of nature.

By contrast, justice is a force of humankind. Justice isn't about the standing up; justice is about the helping or the getting in the way or the being irrelevant. My teacher's version of righteousness, as uprightedness, was morally neutral. If uprightedness happens eventually, no matter what, there's no good or bad uprightedness, there's only early or late. But there's definitely excellent, good, mediocre, poor, and bad justice. There's timely justice, there's stingy justice, there's belated justice, there's Roman justice, there's English justice, there's Papal justice, there's martial justice, there's poetic justice, there's sweet justice, there's sour justice, there's even surreal justice, to the point of Kafkaesque justice.

Now is the time in this column when I like to turn to concrete examples, examples similar to bricks, only more cement-like, to illustrate my musings.

Here's an instance of justice and standing up: Rep. Robert Matsui died at the age of 63 on New Years Day. Matsui spent his earliest childhood in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II. Later he stood up to become a US Congressman for California, a job he held for 26 years, from 1979 on. One of his achievements in Congress was helping to gain the passage of an official apology for the wartime internment, together with compensation for the survivors. That would be justice. We should all honor his life and the justice he helped create.

Ironically, at the same time that Robert Matsui was dying, the Pentagon and the CIA were asking the White House to make arrangements to keep some alleged enemy combatants at Guantanamo in prison for life. Specifically, the Defense Department wants 25 million dollars to build a prison for about 200 detainees for whom there is likely not enough evidence to convict in a military tribunal, and whom the government acknowledges do not even have any intelligence to give up.

That would be bad justice, even Kafkaesque justice. I remember when it was supposed that Kafkaesque justice only happened in KGB dominated USSR and Soviet satellite states. Welcome to the new world. But remember this too: standing up happens.