Two years ago this month, my dear friend Sarah’s life was struck from her body as unexpectedly as any life is so granted: suddenly, without warning, but sublimely all the same. As those who were touched by Sarah’s life reacted, reeled, and writhed at the prospect of her unseemly demise, I detached myself from the situation by assessing the sad state of affairs philosophically.
As emotionally repressive as it was at the time, my methodology did breathe into me numerous inspired and impassioned epiphanies about the world in which we live. You see, many of those around me were gouged out inside, grieving for the transcendent soul of which Sarah once held. As a result, there was much talk of who had killed Sarah, and how justice had to be served.
Some individuals spoke so fixedly on levying a sentence upon Sarah’s killer that I believe the concept of justice for them served as an emotional placeholder they could stow upon a shelf. This, perhaps, was in order to function in a mode of normality to which they were more accustomed. Sadly, I believe that this placeholder may still idly sit, gathering dust, on many of these metaphysical shelves, months after Sarah’s life-thief had been so sentenced.
My experience observing this seared into my heart and soul this absolute truth: one of the stark realities of this ephemeral existence is that we humans are confined to accept that our greatest of social ideals, justice, will never quite be enough.
Indeed, the truth is that justice will always be reactionary; justice will always be after-the-fact. Justice cannot be served to someone who has not yet slaughtered innocent children at a school. Justice cannot be served to individuals who have not yet flown planes into two towers. Justice cannot be served to political zealots in the early 20th century who have not yet committed genocide against millions of Jews.
Yet, for those who would eventually undergo the scalding traumas of these events, one has to question whether criminal trials, or an-eye-for-an-eye Hammurabian-code would even begin to assuage these wounds… It is said that the purest form of justice exists as a justice that is fair and reasonable and, most of all, blind.
I say no. I say no. I say that the only real, true, honest, and authentic definitions of justice include the admission that there is no such thing as pure justice, not really.
For real justice, real repayment from what was stolen, would be the undoing of whatever form of injustice was previously invoked. But this cannot happen, can it? We cannot go back in time. We cannot save those peoples in world history who succumbed to genocide, to terrorism, to deranged mass-shootings, to systematic enslavement, can we?
Just the same, I cannot go back in time and save Sarah from that drunk driver, tell her not to walk on the sidewalk that night, or to wait just a little longer before heading back home.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of justice not because it was the purest ideal he believed humans could attain, but because it was the necessary ideal to maintain.
After decades, centuries of inhumanity directed towards those persons of color, justice was not going to solve a nation’s racial issues, but perhaps it would allow the scar tissue to finally settle over.
Our lives too, are impure. At first, when we emerge from the womb our skin is soft, our eyes unbiased, unfiltered, untrained by cultural predilections or disappointing social interactions. But soon we experience, we see, we take in and absorb the world.
Oft these impressions are mental and emotional. Yet from time to time we truly trip and fall, and when we bleed, we can rest assured that our body will remember this fall. Scars will form.
Wind-battered, skin-shattered impressions upon the canvas of the self ebb and flow throughout the whole of our lives. We call these marks scars.
What’s more, we tend to endeavor to veil these scars from the world. Indeed, whether mental, emotional, or physical, we curtain these markings perhaps to avoid succumbing to the same fate of helplessness again.
Our nation has many scars; humanity has many scars. Here in America we often attempt to hide these scars in special ways. Socio-economic stratification; avoiding the gaze of the homeless woman screaming incomprehensible speech-spatterings on the street corner; or, watching from the comfort of our homes as a child of color is shot to death by policemen less than three seconds after exiting their car, not taking the matter to court.
We endeavor to cover these scars from mind, body, and soul. But today I am here to tell you that every time we avoid a crisis, a trouble, an obstacle, a humanitarian crime, we break open that sensitive scar tissue, and cause blood to spill from the very fiber of our country.
Today I point this out to you, my fellow Foresters, peers, and human companions, not as a mere speech but as a plea. Demand justice from this world. Do not settle for anything less than the most just world you can achieve. Do this, though, with the knowledge that justice will never solve obstacles, it will merely, blessedly, allow them to scar over.
Scar tissue has never lied about its intent. It is there to represent past crimes, past faults the world has placed us and we have placed upon the world. Scar tissue is the physical result of a tumultuous, chaotic world that willingly, willfully, encouraged us to question our mortality. Scar tissue, in so many words, is justice. Battered, unideal, and infuriating, but real and the best we can do.
The world has never been perfect, but it can become more perfect than it was the day before. Today I implore each and every one of you to reflect upon your own scar tissue. To realize that, like it, justice is a reaction. To hear the lesson my friend Sarah taught me with her last breath and that Martin Luther King, Jr. taught me with his: that it is unlikely that justice will ever truly heal wounds, indeed justice will always leave scars.
But these scars should never silence us, never allow us to regress. They must always force our hand, coaxing us forward, enticing us to punch a human shaped, ethical impression into the dark oblivion of an uncontrolled universe. In doing so, we so place our own scar tissue forever on the ark of reality, reminding us to never forget.
