On Justice

I am a middle class, white, male American.  This makes me one of the most privileged people in the world.  I did not have any say in this.  I was simply born.

In a world more and more marked by the knowledge of inequality and injustice, my comfort could almost be considered a crime.  Perhaps it should be considered a crime. The only thing is that it is people of my status doing most of the complaining.

I have had some difficulty respecting the complaints of the "Occupy" movement in America.  Certainly there is tremendous inequality of wealth in America.  It is unjust.  It is wrong.  But I feel like American's don't have any right to complain.  Certainly, the economy is awful and people can't find jobs.  But people in America, except for very rare cases, don't starve.  There are places where people can find shelter from the elements if they are willing to look for it.  But for billions of people in the world, that is not the case.  America has an inordinate proportion of the worlds wealth  It seems selfish and narrow-minded to ask the extremely wealthy to lower their standard of living when the moderately wealthy are unwilling to lower their own.

Of course it is more than just inequality of wealth that the "Occupy" movement is protesting.  It is protesting hundreds, perhaps thousands of things.  That is the key to both its power and its inefficiency.  Many people are protesting a system of exploitation:  the same system exploiting the average American as is exploiting the citizens of less prosperous and industrialised nations.  Soon, if things do not change, people will start trying to smash the system.  The problem is that no one has proposed any solutions.  That is perhaps the biggest reason why it should be taken seriously.

In some ways, I think I may be too much of a moralist to be a social activist.  The way I look at human nature, I am not confident in the ability of any system to solve our problems.  Some are probably better than others, less likely to promote certain wrongs, but humans have this brilliant way of finding new ways to do evil. I think that I, like George Orwell said of Charles Dickens, believe that if everyone just behaved decently, we would have a decent society.  And it usually takes more than a protest to change people's hearts.  Of course, people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi were pretty effective in their times.

This is my way of saying that we live in a terribly broken world.  That brokenness pains me.  I feel the guilt of centuries of sin.  And it pains me that I have no idea how this world can be fixed other than the extreme difficulty of one person at a time.  I am more and more convinced that there can be no positive social change without negative personal change.  But I long to see that change.

Today, however, whether fair or unfair, I am comfortable.  I am blessed.  I am happy.  I am loved.


I am thankful.