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Dr. Wes Browning |
Let’s get serious about justice!
Ha, ha! No, seriously, we’ll talk.
First of all, why am I interested in justice? Well, I have a big disclaimer to make here: I want some. So I may be seen to have a conflict of interest. Or you might say, “He hasn’t had any justice, so what would he know about it?” On the other hand, wanting some makes you attentive. It makes you look up “justice” and justice-related words in dictionaries and beg other people to tell you what they’ve heard about it. Eventually you get to know as much about it as anyone else who hasn’t had it. I want to share some of what I have learned.
The first thing I learned was that, as justice is about fairness, and as fairness concerns mutuality, therefore justice is actually a verb that describes a social behavior rather than a state of being. In other words, you can’t really HAVE justice, you can only do it, with other people. I learned that in a nursery, during a fight over a thingy with different colored wheels that spun around.
The second thing I have learned about it is that the mutuality part has to be consensual for it to be really good justice. The best justice is not enforced fairness but fairness that comes about willingly. You learn that by watching cops from a safe distance, and seeing people go in and out of jails.
The third and most important thing I have learned about justice is that imaginative people do it better. This works in two ways. If you’re imaginative, you can put yourself in the minds of your partners. You can understand how their situation looks to them and can therefore better know their needs and wants. Also, imaginative people are better at coming up with excellent ways to meet their partners’ needs and wants without neglecting their own. Technique matters!
That last discovery is best illustrated in the negative. Just look at the lousy justice that boring, unimaginative people give, and you’ll see what I mean!
For example, Mayor Nickels and his administration have lately been trying to do justice with people in and around homeless encampments. How boring and unimaginative are Mayor Nickels et. al? Well, they are dealing with homeless people who have no place to go but where they are, and they tell them to go there! Hello? There’s no “there” there! Wake up!
An unimaginative person can’t see how someone standing around at the scene of an altercation with what is, or even what just looks like, a weapon, might be innocent, and not deserve to be riddled with bullets. So when off duty Mt. Vernon, NY police officer Christopher Ridley wrestled his own gun away from an assault suspect he had been trying to arrest in White Plains recently, and just then four White Plains officers appeared, someone said, “Drop the gun or we’ll shoot,” and when Ridley didn’t drop his gun in the customary allotment of one-twentieth of a second (one-half normal reaction time), they shot him dead. They are now saying, “We didn’t know he was a fellow police officer,” which is believable, since Mt. Vernon is a good 10 miles from White Plains, so they’d likely never met. And if you don’t have any imagination, what is true for you is only what you know is true.
The recent Post-Intelligencer “Victory and Ruins” series, exposing how authorities put justice on hold for the benefit of a few of the UW Huskies during that team’s 2000 run for the Rose Bowl, provides a beautiful example of the need for good technique in justice-making. Timing is essential. It’s extremely important to know when to turn on the lights. You have to have respect for all of your partners, not just ones who are doing you supremely enjoyable favors at the moment.
Otherwise you could be regretting your behavior six years later, once the glow has worn off. |
