justice.............................

 

People want to see justice done. It’s part of storytelling, and part of life. It’s not virtuous or kind to let marauders prey on the weak indefinitely. It’s not charitable to let brigands upend the order of a palace of a society. There’s nothing compassionate in letting villains off the hook.

-Spencer Klavan, commenting on Christopher Nolan's film, Odyssey

Never surrender.........................

 

     Gibran's bitter denunciation of both religious and political injustice prevailing at the time, brought about his anticipated exile from the country and his excommunication from the church, although his parents were staunch Maronites.  It was the story, Khalil the Heretic, in particular which drove the Sultan and his Emirs into trepidation and cause nervous authorities in the entire Middle and Near East to examine their governments.

    Gibran was quietly pursuing painting with his friend Rodin in Paris when he learned of the ceremonial destruction of his book, and he merely expressed the thought that it was excellent cause for the issuance of a second edition.

-Martin L. Wolf, from the Preface to Gibran's Spirits Rebellious

Be careful...........................

 ........................what you wish for.

Responsibility...............

  One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. 

-Martin Luther King, Jr., as excerpted from his Letter from Birmingham Jail

Mutually constitutive............................

 The ultimate success of a ruler thus derives from his ability to recognize the mutually constitutive relationships between political power, military force, prosperity, and justice for his people.

-Alan Mikhail,  God's Shadow:  Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World

Respect...............................

. . . recognize a sadly persistent fact:  the concepts contained in words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts;  on the contrary, they are rare.  People are not born knowing what these are.  It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.

-James Baldwin, from his essay The Crusade of Indignation as found in The Price Of The Ticket:  Collected Nonfiction: 1948-1985

Compelled.............................

Beyond this, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the eighth-century prophets left their little villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns; and just as the Apostle Paul left his little village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet and city of the Greco-Roman world, I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular hometown. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid. 

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider.

-Martin Luther King, Jr., from his 1963 Letter From Birmingham Jail

King....................................

One may well ask, "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "An unjust law is no law at all." Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. To use the words of Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher, segregation substitutes an "I - it" relationship for the "I - thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things.

-Martin Luther King, Jr., as excerpted from here

The echoes of history...................

     Nevertheless, that burden of past glory loomed over Alcibiades' age group just as the accomplishments of  the "greatest generation" of World War II do our own, especially when men like his guardian Pericles constantly harangued younger Athenians about their imperial burdens.  Spartans also fled similar apprehensions about becoming soft in comparison to their roughneck Lacedaemonian granddads who had died blocking the pass at Thermopylae.  thus, the Corinthians remonstrated with the Peloponnesians on the eve of the battle:  "It is not a just thing that all that was won through poverty should be destroyed through prosperity."

-Victor Davis Hanson,  A War Like No Other:  How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

Alter.................................

     A man only begins to be a man when he ceases to whine and revile, and commences to search for the hidden justice which regulates his life.   And as he adapts his mind to that regulating factor, he ceases to accuse others as the cause of his conditions, and builds himself up in strong and noble thoughts;  ceases to kick against circumstances, but begins to use them as aids to his more rapid progress, and as a means of discovering the hidden powers and possibilities within himself.
       Law, not confusion, is the dominating principle in the universe;  justice, not injustice, is the soul and substance of life;  and righteousness, not corruption, is the molding and moving force in the spiritual government of the world.   This being so, man has but to right himself to find that the universe is right, he will find that as he alters his thoughts towards things and other people, things and other people will alter towards  him.

-James Allen,  As A Man Thinketh

Uh-oh.............................

“Never pray for justice, because you might get some.” 

-Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

On expediency...................

Not only does the action of Governments not deter men from crimes; on the contrary, it increases crime by always disturbing and lowering the moral standard of society. Nor can this be otherwise, since always and everywhere a Government, by its very nature, must put in the place of the highest, eternal, religious law (not written in books but in the hearts of men, and binding on every one) its own unjust, man-made laws, the object of which is neither justice nor the common good of all but various considerations of home and foreign expediency.

-Leo Tolstoy

King.......................................

      You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask, "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "An unjust law is no law at all."   

     Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. To use the words of Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher, segregation substitutes an "I - it" relationship for the "I - thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. So segregation is not only politically, economically, and sociologically unsound, but it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Isn't segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, an expression of his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? So I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court because it is morally right, and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.

-Martin Luther King, Jr., as excerpted from his timeless Letter From Birmingham Jail

Wondering if this is still true...........

“Injustice in the end produces independence.” 

-Voltaire

That "requires interpretation"......

.......................part is where it gets interesting:

All social values - liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect  - are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these values is to everyone's advantage. Injustice, then, is simply inequalities that are not to the benefit of all. Of course, this conception is extremely vague and requires interpretation.

-John Rawls,  culled from The Main Idea Of The Theory Of Justice

Moral princesses................

........................or, it must be fun having an evil twin.  If you are interested in Three Theories of Social Justice Activism, do read this.  As a bit of flavor:

Regular person: “Mmm, chicken tikka masala is delicious.”
Activist: “I can’t eat that, as doing so makes me complicit in the British colonialist legacy.”

via

Opening paragraphs..............

     There are times in our lives - scary, unsettling times - when we know that we need help or answers but we're not sure what kind, or even what the problem or question is.  We look and look, tearing apart our lives like we're searching for the car keys in our couch, and we come up empty-handed.  Then when we're doing something stupid, like staring at the dog's mismatched paws, we stumble across what we needed to find.  Or even better, it finds us.  It wasn't what we were looking or hoping for, which was usually advice, approval, an advantage, safety, or relief from pain.  I was raised to seek or achieve them, but like everyone, I realized at some point that they do not bring lasting peace, relief, or uplift.  This does not seem fair, after a lifetime spent in their pursuit.  Where, then, do I turn in these increasingly frightening days?  Where do I look for answers when I'm afraid, or confused, or numb?   To an elegant Japanese sage?  A dream-dancing Sioux grandmother with a tinkling laugh?  No.  More often than not, the North Star that guides me through the darkness is the Old Testament prophet Micah.  He must have looked like a complete stoner or a Games of Thrones extra, and smelled like a goat, yet nearly three thousand years ago, he spoke the words that often remind me of my path and purpose.  "What doth God require of thee but to do justice and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"

-Anne Lamott,  Hallelujah Anyway:  Rediscovering Mercy

I never knew..............................

...................................................that I liked Amal Clooney before.

"The wife of actor George Clooney, who represents victims of IS rapes and kidnappings, told a U.N. meeting that what's "shocking" is not just the group's brutality but the "passive" response by the world's nations to the campaign to investigate its crimes and bring the perpetrators to justice."

Plenty tough enough...............

To know and love God, Spinoza insisted, does not require the performance of any ceremonies, nor belief in any supernatural dogmas, nor the acceptance of any allegedly historical narratives in the Bible.  It only requires "the practice of justice and love towards one's neighbor."

-Anthony Gottlieb,  The Dream Of Enlightenment:  The Rise of Modern Philosophy

Tension...............................

You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

-Martin Luther King, Jr., as excerpted from his Letter from Birmingham Jail