What is Justice?

If I was still teaching, this - and yesterday - would be one of those days when the planned topic and lesson would be tossed out the window, and we would instead talk about current events, but within a particular framework of course. I'd probably start by asking about justice, if only because since the news of Osama Bin Laden's death broke, it's been a term that has been thrown around amidst much celebration and flag waving. Yay for us Americans! We got him! (wave flag) Justice has been served! Go team!

And I'd ask students to write on the notion of justice, even while knowing it in itself justice is a word that upper level philosophy classes and seminars focus on as well as law school classes. It's a question that could start many a research paper, and I imagine if I was still teaching composition, I'd receive a whole lot of papers on justice and the death of Osama Bin Laden. I might even be tempted to write one.

If only so I could begin to reconcile the questions it has me go back and grapple with - what is justice? Has it been served? And if yes, now what? And what difference does the serving of justice make in this case? Wikipedia explains that understandings of justice differ in each culture, as cultures are dependent on a shared history and mythology and/or religion. And it goes on to say, that each culture's ethics create values which influence the notion of justice.

But I have to wonder - especially after yesterday - if we don't have some expectations linked to the notion of justice. I think of one of the last scenes of Sister Helen Prejean's Dead Man Walking. In the film based on the book, as Matthew Poncelet is executed, he tells the victim's parents that he hopes his death brings them peace. In the last scene of the film, as Prejean visits the victim's father, the father confesses that his death did not bring him peace - that he feels just as empty after the loss of his daughter.

Monday morning, my family woke up to the news reports of Bin Laden's death and the celebrations at Ground Zero, where people were cheering and popping champagne. A glance on facebook was the Internet equivalent - there was much God Bless America and our troops and thank God he's dead brouhaha. I found it sickening. It made my skin crawl. I felt like I do when I watch movies like Dead Man Walking where I see someone put to death. And of course, like everyone writing these kind of statements, I have to say that I didn't like the man, and obviously - even though assassinating him has questionable legal issues - killing him was the preferred way of capturing him - if only, as the New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin points out in "Killing Osama: Was it Legal?" what were we going to do, put him on trial? With who representing him? And who would? Let him represent himself? And how much would that cost in the security it would require?

No. I have no issue with his death, and even if the killing of him was illegal, it may be one of those necessary evils like so much within the operating of a military is.

It's the champagne popping. It's the celebrations. The skyrocketing of American flag sales at Ground Zero. The shouts of "justice was served" across the land that made my stomach ill, my skin crawling with unease and my heart wishing that I was once again an expat - and preferably an expat in France where in a pinch I can pass as a native.

I'm an NPR addict and can listen to the radio all day. I check facebook all day via the iPhone. But yesterday was a day that I had to turn the radio off, get my son and I out of the house for an all day excursion away from our beloved technology. At ten am EST, the shouts of "Justice was served" were slipping into propaganda, which especially makes me ill, and I didn't feel comfortable saying, Isn't it kind of twisted to rejoice over someone's death, even the death of an enemy? It was my own cowardice that sent me out of the house, I admit. I was too much of a chicken to be the one in the town square to stand up for the human dignity of the executed to be respected - or to be the first one on facebook to admit I wasn't celebrating. And if I had, I would have taken the easier route - of asking is this really what I want to teach my son? That this is how we end the show - by singing, Ding Dong the witch is dead? When someone hurts you, you shouldn't rest until he's dead?

In my own personal failings, I'm working on gaining the confidence to speak when my gut instincts are itching - and not like I did yesterday in the safe company of my husband and sister who happened to agree with me. By the time I went back to the Internet in the late afternoon, I sighed relief as I saw facebook posts, New Yorker blog posts and other parenting articles that felt what I did.

And this morning it seems the pendulum has swung the opposite way, that instead of champagne popping, people are now sharing a reluctance to partake of celebrations, with a lone voice or two saying, "But justice was served."

Yeah, so it was - as much as it could be, even as it is a necessary act for the overall good in the long term. But don't we have unrealistic expectations of justice? I mean, really, what is different about our lives now than two days ago?

Are we safer? No. Can we now meet people at the gate at the airport? No. Can we now say the military has been so effective it's made itself obsolete and we can now put those funds into education? No. Does it change that since 9/11 we've lost tens of thousands of lives? No. Or the ones that have fought and survived come home with such severe PTSD and depression they have a 50% chance of dying at home but by their own hand? No. Or that we've invaded two countries and left them no closer to safety or stability in terms of their government? 

And is this what I'm supposed to tell my son when that 4 year old brat bully on the playground gets punched by a bigger kid, that justice was served? Or that he should deal with problem kids the way the government deals with its enemies? By engaging in assassinations that technically are illegal, but that Bush said were legal when it came to Bin Laden? 

After yesterday, I'm starting to realize that "justice" is as much a created myth as "truth."  So justice was served and Bin Laden is dead. But what again does "justice was served" mean? The Old Testament "eye for an eye"?

In the end last night, we turned the news off again. It was all more of the same, so that Husband finally asked, "What were they going to talk about today?" Husband got a new guitar that he doesn't actually know how to play. But Fyo and I watched him as he practiced in the living room, which took on the look of a coffeehouse. 

By the time he was done, he had worked out the first few chords of "Chariots of Fire" and Corey Hart's "I Wear My Sunglasses at Night." Fyo and I played photo booth with the iPhone.

In the years to come, I imagine this week's death of Bin Laden will take on the significance of the Rosenberg Trials or Germany's Nuremberg's trials, and that it will be an event talked and written about at length, that Obama will get credit for it, much like Reagan got credit for the fall of the Berlin Wall and Communism. Obama may even get re-elected in its afterglow.

And if I was teaching this week, I don't know how I'd wrap up the class, or answer the meaning of serving justice. Only that it's something we do and that the notion of fairness is something wired into our brains. And even as I can see its necessity, it doesn't make me feel good. Or safer.