In the dictionary

[revised edition, 1962]

And there we’ll be,

The two of you and me.

Yet on Tuesday they’re going to chop you off.

Years ago you gave my boys life.

Now they say by staying there

You can just about finish off mine.

Hated the way cold hands rushed

To have you squashed and squeezed.

Don’t they know, there’s no need

For all their flustered expertise.

You would never hurt me.

But it seems

Even government queues

Shrink in fear

Whehever the dreaded words

Breast cancer are heard.

Tentatively,

I cup both tenderly

As déjà vu comes seeping through

The thrill rides and all

The merry go rounds in between.

God, I can even feel

The pull and bite

Milky sips being gobbled up.

They couldn’t get enough, could they?

But then, neither could we.

Damn. Damn these stupid unstoppable tears

Splashing down on you.

Don’t want you to leave

Soggy as an old kitchen rag.

Come on, let’s plan it together your final hour.

Put on your pink Westwood corset

The one that always guaranteed cheers

And never failed to bring Pete

[he, who will miss you almost as much as me]

Down to his knees.

I’m doing it up now

As tight as I can

Hold on…. Can you still breathe.

One last thing before you go,

Don’t worry about the space you leave behind.

I’ll do you proud, whatever it takes

I’ll keep it in the style you were accustomed to,

Until it is time for me

To come looking for you

And we are whole,

Once more.

There’s an indelible link between our ideas of religion and our ideas of justice. More than loving your neighbor, more than forgiveness, more than culture and nationalism, the idea of justice is central to any persistent view of religious thought.

So OJ’s alleged partner in crime wasn’t actually stealing anything. In his mind he was righting a wrong, helping OJ get back his memorabilia that was stolen from him. That is justice, and that’s a religious concept, thus the Bible and his righteous proclamation.

Despite what the Christian Bible actually says, what people view it means is that wrongs will be righted, that the unjust will be punished even violently, and that the just will be rewarded.

You see this contradiction everywhere. The “Bible Belt” is huge on both capital punishment and the Ten Commandments. I suppose “You shall not kill” can be reinterpreted to mean “You shall not murder.” However, “murder” is a political word. One man’s murder is another man’s liberation. Besides all that, the New Testament is full of requirements by Jesus that we forgive our enemies and not retaliate.

What we ultimately strive for in terms of religious spirituality is for justice to prevail. Not to say that things like compassion and forgiveness aren’t extremely important, but these things tend to have relevance in a more personal setting. Individuals forgive for personal reasons. It would be a perversion of justice for societies to forgive criminals regularly without cause.

One of the most common, but strange, questions in religious philosophy concerns the injustice of God. Why do bad things happen to good people and why do good things happen to bad people? I say strange because the question is absurd. God is not unjust. Bad and good things happen for two reasons. First they happen randomly. Second they happen because we make them happen. God has nothing to do with it.

We know from the story of Job in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) that God on Earth acts in random ways, essentially like nature without any unseen motivation. We also know from the first chapter of the Quran that we must reach out to God in order to be shown the straight path.

This puts the cause of justice squarely in human hands. It’s up to us, not God to remedy injustice. This is a primary pursuit of human activity. We are motivated to create a just world and eliminate injustice.

The interesting suggestion that I would make is that injustice is much more than an element of behavior that humans remedy through criminal punishment. Injustice is innate to nature, and it’s up to us to get rid of it.

For instance cancer is an injustice. It’s unjust for a good person to suffer and die from cancer. Helping cure cancer is part of the fight for justice. A lot of people want to find cures for cancer, and it’s much more than making money or putting your name down in the history books. It is a part of our fundamental drive to make things right.

This idea begs the question of the degree of legitimacy of the US pursuit of justice in foreign lands. Consider that cancer kills over one half a million Americans each year, and now the US deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan greatly out number deaths from 9/11 and all acts of global terrorism. I would say that if we prioritized our pursuit of justice, we would have different policies with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan.

We live in a violent world, and America is a violent society. I would suggest that this violence comes from not understanding the concept of justice, and being unjust in our application of government policy.

For instance, many American children join gangs. My claim is that they do this because the framework of justice that they grow up in, both at home and society at large is inconsistent and corrupt. They seek out gangs because within them, justice is swift and consistent in the self contained world of a young gang member. Paradoxically the drive to join a gang in a young person comes from that person’s desire for justice.

And on the global stage, meanwhile, the US hegemonic system of justice is absurd. It’s kind of like the Wild West out there were people are motivated to take justice into their own hands because just power structures are either non-existent or the power structures are unjust themselves. We won’t see any ebbing of challenges to the global power structures until they become just.