Brian’s Reflection: Thursday, Dec 11, 2008


That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we black are wise:
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes.

- Langston Hughes, poet


Boy/Girl, can you not hear the echo of the Hebrew prophet Amos in these lines??!! They are like a visual parable. I can see that statue of Justice, blindfolded ….. with streams of blood and the festering of sores seeping down her face. And the eyes – if the blindfold were removed – blind with disease, blind with the rot of corruption.

Oh, not because Justice has Herself given up. But because Justice has depended on men and women to be Her instruments in the World ….. and She has been forsaken.

This is why Prop 8 in California was passed (though happily by a small margin), with the Mormon Church and the Roman Catholic Church acting as the handmaids of Injustice. This is why 1/7th of Americans have no health coverage; Insurance companies and politicians and many doctors acting as handmaidens of Injustice. This is why many workers make the Minimum Wage, or even more, and sleep at night in homeless shelters and eat at soup kitchens and buy clothes at second-hand shops; most of us in the so-called “middle class”, preserving our own meager “benefits”, acting as the handmaids of Injustice. The example are endless. Why are the people rioting in Greece, given a push by the police killing of a teenager? Because the lid is coming off around the World, the lid of vast numbers of people barely making it, while a small elite rule and have an obscene life-style. Robert Mugabe living in luxury while the people of Zimbabwe die of starvation and cholera?? Lady Justice weeps while those who should be Her handmaids greedily hoard.

Mr. Hughes was speaking of American blacks, but his parable is universal. We had better pay attention ….. or soon the World will be writhing in the fire of Injustice. And there will be no one else to blame but ourselves.

Brian+