J is for Justice

J is for Justice

 Justice is one of those two needs that motivate our highest and our basest behaviors. The other is Safety. Neither is attainable. We can’t give nor get them. Scholars and philosophers have studied and discussed them. Governments and religions have been built around promises of providing them. Tiny humans take up the concepts as soon as they realize that they are separate from the world around them.

Perhaps because Justice and Safety are impossible to have in our everyday lives, we imagine them. We invent stories around them.

The bad guy is identified, stopped, and punished. Safety is restored and Justice is served. There is nothing so dissatisfying as a murder mystery that goes unsolved or a villain who goes unpunished.

It happens all the time in real life and we still stop what we’re doing to watch our daily dose of news about the O.J. Simpsons and the Oscar Pistoriuses of the world on trial. We weren’t there. We can’t know what really happened or who did what or why. We hear too many possibilities – the prosecution’s story, the defense’s story.

These events underscore the perception that Justice is not only blind, but she’s lame. She staggers and stumbles along like Shakespeare’s Richard III, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deform’d, unfinish’d, scarce half made up. The difference in Justice in the real world and Justice in Shakespeare’s fictional world is that Shakespeare could establish without a reasonable doubt what the crime was, who the criminal was, exact the appropriate punishment, and reassure the realm of a time to come with smooth-fac’d peace, With smiling plenty, and fair prosperous days!

Since I have to live a real life, I am thankful for the fiction writers who give me moments and hours of respite in the imagined world of Justice and Safety.