With Liberty and Justice For All?

With Liberty and Justice for All?
By Marilyn Mackenzie


I saw two interesting things today.

The first was a comment made in a TV show that aired 12 years ago. It doesn't matter which show it was. The line on the show was that justice changes the world. I pondered that, and my immediate thought was that injustice also changes the world, and likely more than justice does.

The second interesting thing was that The World Justice Challenge is a yearly global competition to identify, recognize, and promote good practices and high-impact projects and policies that protect and advance the rule of law. The competition is conducted by the The World Justice Forum, the premier international event for the rule of law, convening hundreds of government, nongovernmental, and business leaders and experts from a broad spectrum of disciplines and geographies.

Based upon the various happenings in courtrooms across our nation at this moment in history, it is doubtful that anyone would suggest that our country - as a whole - cares about justice or fairness or the rule of law. Nor would anyone suggest that half of our country has a lick of sense or the mental acuity to be able to consider long term consequences of actions taken today.

We baby boomers and the two generations before ours have allowed this to happen. As a whole, we should be ashamed of what we have allowed this country to become, mostly because of our complacency and our fears of hurting anyone's feelings by sharing truth.

It's our future generations that will have to live with what we allowed. All because when we did have family sit down dinners, we thought that it was impolite to talk about religion and politics. And because we stopped having those sit down dinners all together. Taking our offspring to dance and sports practices became more important than bonding around the dinner table.