I've been against justice ever since I read that line from Hamlet -- roughly paraphrases as "if you treat people according to what they deserve, they would mostly all get whipped."
2: Twain focuses more on, as heebie puts it, activating the anger centers, but he comes up with the same result:
If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?
Republicans who killed black people.
Pretty sure assholes with not-acted-upon murderous fantasies do not deserve to be murdered by police either.
I'm suggesting the police/militia guy would escape hanging for committing murder.
This really sounds like a worse framework for understanding activism than even charity.
AIHMB, my dad was working with a charity to pay the heating bill for an elderly woman when he realized the reason she couldn't pay the bill was because she was paying on credit card debt from decades ago. He told her to stop paying, sent the creditors a letter saying he was representing her in this matter, that all communications had to go through him, and that they could try to sue if they wanted. It's not exactly social, but it was justice. Or at least it was legal.
This makes me think of the anger-as-spice fortune cookie line from The Queen's Gambit.
Obviously, you want students to understand that the pain they see is more the result of systemic injustice than individual conduct, and to see that solutions lie in collective action more than individual virtue. Not that there's anything wrong with collecting cans of food for people experiencing hunger.
If you were planning to combat injustice by marrying Jeff Bezos's ex and helping her give away her money, you're too late.
I'm fascinated by this pairing, but I'll wait till comment 40 to hijack.
11: I'll wait till comment 40 to admonish you to just make a post out of it.
I kind of like "the common good" as a better framework than justice. Justice seems to me to have an implication that there is an objective state of affairs where everything is just and all we have to do is correct deviations from this state of affairs. And for lots of bad things, I think it's easy to identify what's wrong, but hard to pick what to do about it.
I see kids in church talking about a mission trip and the like. I assume the smarter ones at least wonder why a village in Guatemala has less wealth than a half dozen teenagers.
I guess if I listened better, I would probably know the answer.
15: That really is where "the water you swim in" is blinding. Their entire lives they've know that there are poor people elsewhere to be helped, and that their virtue is in sacrificing some of their time and wealth to help the Guatemalans. But high school is when you're getting a handle on challenging your family dynamics, which you've experienced directly since birth -- and you're still thrashing for explanations, roles, peer versus parental authority, etc. Synthesizing the classes you've taken, so colonial history, economic systems, etc. all come together into a coherent whole would be asking a lot -- particularly since students silo information so efficiently. Who cares what happened 50 or 100 years ago -- all old people want to do is talk about old times, right?
17: I started reading Caste, and I got the feeling that Wilkerson was just trying to infuriate ogged, by violating the Analogy Ban in the most egregious ways imaginable. But to get back on topic, the point of all her analogies (the US is an old house th- you have to know how it was built to understand how it could fall apart, the US is a patient going to see the doctor - the doctor won't even start to try to figure out what's wrong with you until she knows your full medical history and what diseases run in your family etc.) is to make it vivid and incontrovertible that the history does matter.
The Reagan administration can't have been more than 15 years ago.
19: We're old, Moby! But be comforted - I'm still older.
Shit man, its got to be almost 20 years by now.
The Reagan administration is to 2021 as Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel is to Reagan. Strange but true.
The construction of the Sagrada Familia is to the Cleveland administration as the construction of the Sagrada Familia is to the Biden administration.
When Michael J. Fox went to the future in Back to the Future, he actually went to the Sagrada Familia, only we're not used to thinking about 1986 that way.
"what are the limitations eventually to a "justice" framework for social change?"
I come to this having listened to a podcast (on the way home from my first Moderna stab yay) about some Black Lives Matter activists, very much activating their anger for justice. When I got home and had to stop listening, one had had the NYPD outside his apartment, 30 strong, with a battering ram, and another had been run over on his bicycle, on purpose he thinks, and by NYPD in an unmarked car, he thought. So those seem like limitations you don't run into in canned food drives.
Resistance as ported to This American Life
This is what I'm always on about!
I dunno, if we can have a conception of "justice" that is more about hatred-of-injustice rather than love-for-whatever-your-ideal-of-'justice'-might-be, we could perhaps progress a little bit.
So, no, I don't think a justice framework is a good stopping point. I don't want to live on the anarchist Camazotz, always knowing what is right and doing what is just. Revolution without ecstasy is just "rvolution" which is confusing to pronounce, as well as boring. BORING.
I've always liked "justice" as a framework for these conversations, and I'm happy to define that, Natilo fashion, as the rejection of injustice. I grew up with the injunction from my parents: "Nobody ever said life was fair." That always struck me as not merely as an acknowledgement of injustice, but a gleeful endorsement of it.
They were trying to prepare you for the tree.
Oh god, I always used to say "because of people like you!" when adults told me "life isn't fair." Some of those adults genuinely disliked me, I think. But yes, it's a dumb thing to say.
I don't even care about Mackenzie Scott and the science teacher anymore. Thanks a lot, petering out thread.
Science teachers get the women because of the tight pants and well-known tendency to put out after two gin and tonics. Everyone knows this.