Justice, Thoughts 1-30-15

I’m writing this in a state of extreme fatigue.  As such, there are likely to be numerous grammatical errors and non-sequiturs.  Still, I’m writing from an impassioned state, and that’s gotta be worth something, right?

For a very long time the concept of justice has been hanging heavily on my mind.  I’ve strived to see some reason, to understand why it is we as a society are so obsessed with it, but have always fallen short on some ground or another.  Justice, to me, seems obsessed with retribution; now perhaps that’s thanks to the “justice” the american legal system administers (it likely is, at least to some degree), but I’ve still been unable to separate the two — justice, it seems, ubiquitously is a means for enacting only partially qualified revenge.

Revenge is perhaps a more easily assailable concept.  In it there exists some element of blindness and coldness, for revenge, if pursued in direct proportion to the wrong, requires (to be considered fair) that the wrongdoer’s circumstance and motive was plain — that they willfully enacted some malicious event for which there were no ulterior motives or explanations than the wronging itself, a rather comical and incredulous circumstance.  No things are so plain, however hotly our emotions burn for the punishment of our miscreants.  

Perhaps this position is wrought of naiveté or an inability to cope with the things being of a different vein, but I wholeheartedly believe that people — that life in general — are/is essentially good.  It’s not the nature of the universe to do evil, and manifestations of what we perceive as evil are rarely that.  They are, instead, the result of the complex interactions between, ideologies, moral systems, physical needs, and psychological needs.  Interactions that, given the right (read wrong) circumstance, allow for any person to behave in an ‘evil’ or ‘malicious’ way.  

It is because of that exact vulnerability, the ability for anyone or anything given a malignant environment to embody some form of evil, that I believe the only just reaction is one of responsive forgiveness.  Rather than chastising or a person or forfeiting a chunk of their life to stagnancy, there should be systems with a goal of addressing and treating the issues that lead to a criminal act rather than the retributory (and ineffective) system that we currently adopt.