While munching on pizza in one of Harvard Square’ many tucked away food coops, I found myself slipping into contemplation. Scanning the drab alleyway outside the window, my eyes fell upon a pitiful old beggar, no younger it seemed than 67, opening and closing the door to CVS for passersby. Intrigued and repulsed by the degradation possible even at his old age, I unabashedly studied the figure noticing with surprise that his grimy-gray, wrinkled T-shirt read, “superior justice” in bright blue letters. Struck by the quirk of fate that those words could emblazon the withered chest of such an apish, god-forsaken creature, I began to ponder the meaning of justice. What does justice mean to us in this unjust world? To the poor or unjustly treated of this world justice seems the most baffling. Indeed many people mislabel it as revenge or equality for all. To all of us in between riches and rags who look on un-blinded, the world at first glance seems hopelessly unjust. Yet somehow all of us know no one can argue against “fickle justice” without in some way condemning himself. The fact of the matter is we are all unjustly treated, but we cannot wear that on our sleeve.
Extreme poverty appears to slowly corrode the soul, to blur reason, and to cause a dangerous isolation. Justice becomes revenge against a cruel society. Some of the poorest places on earth prove the most violent, just as some of the once poorest men on earth often become the most dangerous. Hitler, today’s Middle Eastern terrorists, or the common criminal rose out of poverty clinging to a hatred of someone or something. Poverty causes everything to become a means to an end. It would seem natural for the beggar to view the world as constantly unjustly treating him. To his eyes would not mankind seem to have locked him out of society? Though unreasonable, living in constant needs invites these feelings. Indeed the question, why cannot I not have what I want, is answered never by blaming oneself but by blaming others. Even the eyes of the seemingly benign creature that stood in front me may glitter occasionally with resentment at the businessman who rushes by impatiently into the store. He may himself have formed a dangerous definition of “superior justice.”
What is justice or, for that matter, injustice? I often rebel against my own little injustices, but in context they are mere fluff. Even in America we cannot call our society entirely just. As I stared at the two extremes, the beggar and Harvard, I wondered how dumps of ignorance and despair could sit across from the seat of ambition and knowledge, Harvard. But I also wondered where someone entering Framingham State College stood between the two. Why do I lack the talents of those entering Harvard? Those students, who seem to have everything from 800s in SAT math and English to polo championship awards, could make me feel slighted, but in reality my happy childhood makes it to complain about anything. Who knows what sort of parents that bum grew up with? What sort of home he grew up knowing? And who knows how many people grow up with these stark realities? Then is my good fortune an injustice? Certainly the greatest injustices in this world do not present themselves in the fact that some beautiful 18 year old in Hollywood can now retire. Because injustice in this world comes in many different forms, and to a certain extent that celebrity’s apparent good fortune is an injustice. Thus it seems impossible to define justice.
Seeing the extreme of the beggar and the extreme of Harvard made me somehow feel glad to reside in the middle ground. There I had little cause to forget my humanity or to wallow in it. From my vantage I can see that we come to our state in life partly through fate and partly through our own decisions. But from the impoverished physically to the impoverished morally, too many blame an “unjust world” as their cause of unhappiness. Somehow the beggar’s demand for justice, for everyone to recognize his plight and in some way respect or, at least, pity it, reminded me of the constant cry of homosexuals for a much less reasonable justice. Homosexuals demand that we treat their partly, undeserved moral poverty in a similar manner as the beggar seems to demand we treat his partly, unearned material--poverty—totally, impartially. So we throw “money” into the cups they hold, but we never reach beneath the surface and ask what brought them to such conclusions. We never ask why the beggar and the homosexual can live with knowledge(Harvard in the beggar's case) across the street but simply ignore it.
The world appears nothing less than a cruel place, a place where we know all too much about human justice and all too little about “superior justice.” Why should any of us comply with injustice? We must, because through the fall we ourselves cannot deny some responsibility for it. But that does not mean we should do nothing about it. Trying to right all the wrongs done against us leads first to revenge, but this revenge can grow into a higher aspiration. Recognizing and resisting the injustice in this world can lead to a pure desire for freedom. It can make one examine more closely what one takes for granted. This seems to have happened when the colonists transformed an angry passion into the civilized yearning for a truly just society. In this life, however, the key is to recognize when our plea for justice is truly just.