With Liberty and Laws for All

I read a little news item this morning about a state that is contemplating requiring students desiring to graduate from high school to pass a citizenship test.  What a marvelous idea!  I can hardly contain my enthusiasm for this to be put into place.  Oh, that every state would pass such a requirement.  Can you imagine what would happen if we actually taught civic responsibility in the classroom instead of “No Justice, No Peace”?

Justice is such a fickle thing.  I’ve come to the conclusion long ago that one person’s justice is another person’s injustice.  We need not look any further than Ferguson right now to gain an appreciation for my conclusion.

Because justice is such a fickle thing we as a nation have become a nation of laws.  Laws help us govern how we interact with each other and how the government interacts with us and how we interact with government.  We enact laws in the pursuit of fairness and in the hopes that a level playing field will be available to all in the pursuit of justice.  As need requires we modify, update, delete, or add new laws.  At times I think we should change the closing words of our Pledge of Allegiance from “with liberty and justice for all” to “with liberty and laws for all”.

Sometimes we are satisfied with the justice that comes from the law and other times we are not.  That is the reason for calling our courts, courts of law, not courts of justice.  Likewise, some people are satisfied with the justice that comes from application of the rule of law while at the same time others are not satisfied with those results.  There are all kinds of little sayings that we could apply here like beauty is in the eye of the beholder or perhaps one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

In all cases, those laws should serve as a means of preventing chaos and by preventing capricious actions on the part of those who think they should be able to act with impunity.  At the same time, laws should prevent private retribution or revenge by those who feel that they should take the law into their own hands.  History has shown that when we take “justice” into our own hands that blood feuds result.  In our pursuit of justice, no person should be above the law.

There is a certain beauty in our legal system.  While we have professionals who know the rules and who work to apply the law in the courtroom, we have everyday citizens who elect judges and who also sit on juries.  It is all about “we the people”.  Juries serve as a representative cross section of “the people” both on grand juries and petit juries.  We have citizen juries in hopes that they represent community values in application of law rather than attorneys who spit out judgments like computers.  Of course, it doesn’t always work that way, and when it fails we use our system of laws to correct it.  Sometimes correction is a long, painful process.  But, it is a process that has worked for centuries and while it is not perfect, it appears to be the best.  At least it is the best for us.

So, let me return to my initial comments about requiring graduating high school seniors to pass a citizenship test.  So much of the unrest I see today comes from a lack of knowledge of two things: the facts (what actually happened and the reason for the events that transpired) and the way we function as a country.  As for the facts, all too often people either know nothing of the facts then simply react to what they see as an injustice, or they only know one side, if that much, of the events.  We call that going off half-cocked.  The way we function as a country includes having a basic knowledge of our laws and our respect for those laws and having a basic knowledge of our responsibilities and rights, and then exercising them.

As for police, well, it seems that everybody knows what a police officer’s job is.  Everybody knows how to be a cop.  Everybody knows the law.  Everybody knows how to enforce the law.  Judging from what I’ve seen lately, everybody knows how to be a citizen as much as they know how to be a cop.  Perhaps as we focus on fixing what is wrong with police maybe we should put equal emphasis on fixing civic (civil) knowledge and behavior.