What I Believe About Justice

When I think of the word justice, I think of the word “fairness.” I imagine a court. I imagine the judge in his black robe and the defendant shaking at his knees and his conscience waiting to be tried by the jury. But pull open a dictionary and consider it yourself about how justice really works and the simple definition of justice is whether your action or ideology is right or wrong. Is it right to hit someone who’d hit you first? Some would agree because you have the right to hit him back. Some would disagree because you shouldn’t hit people in the first place. Is it right to kill someone? No? But the person you killed had killed your sister. Is it right? Is it right to hurt someone you had hurt you back? Is it wrong to be a pacifist? Is it right to be a vegan? Was Diogenes right for practicing cynicism? Is it right that I follow Christianity? Is it right for me to convert to Islam? Is it right to kill people in the name of God? Is it wrong to pray before I eat? Is it wrong if I use two different colored shoelaces for my shoes and mismatching socks for my feet?

There are obviously many more questions than what I had offered that have been asked and have been left unanswered. Questions that had been thrown out there and later swept away by the wind and flutters aimlessly in the air, occasionally touching a person and occasionally bothering someone as well.  It will be impossible to correctly answer those questions because you will receive 7 billion answers in return. There are about 7 billion minds generating on this earth; imagine those minds working day and night, creating thoughts, ideas, conversations, and dreams. Those 7 billion minds are directed by even millions of different ideologies and cultures that believe in what is truly right and what is absolutely wrong.

 There are different cultures that teach you how to dress and how to behave. What I – a mixed race islander of the Pacific– would believe to be right would be completely absurd to what a Republican American citizen would believe to be right also. My mother easily disagrees to what I believe is right in my opinion of fashion. I will be glad to openly disagree to what a rude, ignorant atheist would have to say about God. The coordination of my fingers typing out this blog would be wrong in the eyes of a professional typist. So why are our ways of thinking different?

Believing in different religions and following different life guidelines can greatly affect one’s justice. If I would say that justice was what you make of it, that your only own rules were right, then how would people agree to a criminal’s sentence during a trial? How would laws be made? I can imagine the elders of an old tribe meeting together at a sacred hut or building. They spit and argue behind their long beards about the rules they plan to follow and post up for their tribe. And those laws that were made in that old sacred building is the same laws that rule a country centuries later. I believe there is a lot of background in the justice we administer today. America’s republic is based on ancient Rome’s republic. Many countries follow the democracy that the Greeks used.

Justice is not what you make it. Justice is the rules and guidelines that direct your life. I have ten precepts on this blog that are my “justice” principles.  Freedom of speech. Freedom of religion. Freedom to bear arms. The Declaration of Independence. Etcetera etcetera. I have my personal justice, and you yourself would have personal principles yourself. Your conscience has justice. You know what is right and what is wrong right?