Being Against "Injustice"

[Please accept my apologies for the crude spacing. My blog is not currently accepting the spaces I ordinarily put between paragraphs. Thank you blogspot.com. The asterisks are the least intrusive spacing device I have thought of (and Bette thought of that one). If anyone has a better idea, I hope you will let me know. Or, even better, let blogspot know.] The American view of justice sounds familiar to me. In fact, it sounds just like us. It reminds me of Justice Potter Stewart's "definition" of obscenity, which was "I know it when I see it." ************************************************************************************************************************************************************ Americans don't have a clear view of what "justice" is and as a result, our discussions among ourselves never end and never decide. We have a much clearer view of what "injustice" is. This is the difference, if I may just play with the words a little here, between Justice Stewart's lack of interest in defining "scenity" and his interest in defining "ob-scenity" clearly enough that it could actually be achieved. ************************************************************************************************************************************************************ When we saw bad things happening to unresisting Negro protesters--if you are in my 101 class, the chances are that you will not remember "Negro protesters”—they seemed so harmless and so ill-used and we saw it all on television. That is what made the civil rights movement popular among northern liberals and tolerable even among northern conservatives. All these pictures of "injustice" shoved in our faces. Surely we can't be asked to just stand by. ************************************************************************************************************************************************************ Now we are seeing pictures of Khadafi (or Gaddafi) threatening the overwhelmed people of Benghazi, Libya and we think we surely can't be asked just to stand by. So we haven't. We have attacked Libyan air defense installations, then planes, then tanks, then concentrations of the Libyan army. Now CIA agents are on the ground for the purpose of "targeting" future airstrikes. ************************************************************************************************************************************************************ Some positive notion of "justice," some sense of how it really could be for a society with Libya's current make up and recent history, would really help us. Do they need to be a national, rather than a tribal, society? If they insist on being Muslim, could they be secular Muslims? Do they need the civil institutions that will allow they to transcend the narrow loyalties that have sustained them to this point in their history? Whether they need those or not, those will not be--trust me, they will NOT be--the first projects they take on. Will we take them on, on their behalf? ************************************************************************************************************************************************************ Will we be the teachers of "ultratribalism?" Will we formulate their civil institutions: impartial, impersonal, and fair? Will we offer our kind of religion, a distant, pale, buffet line kind of religion, in exchange for theirs? Are we, in other words, prepared to work toward some peculiarly Libyan incarnation of "justice?" Or do we just want to condemn and oppose "injustice?" We do, after all, have several other acknowledged wars going on and we have to judge our appetite for substantial investment in a society where our failure may safely be taken for granted.