Familiar words, “liberty and justice.” Three of the last five words of the Pledge of Allegiance, spoken as we salute our flag, they ring true as national standards. They are words worth fighting for, and fighting over.
As we move into the Fourth of July, we
might think about these three words.
With red, white and blue flags billowing, fireworks replicating “bombs
bursting in air,” and beer flowing like blood on the battlefields where our
liberty, if not justice, was won, surely we can take a few minutes to ponder
the reason for celebrating.
Of these three words, I think we
like “liberty” best. It’s the one we
defend most often when we send our boys (and now girls) off to war, their
liberties seriously reduced the moment they don uniforms, where “liberty” means
getting the weekend off.
"Justice” is the word we have to fight to defend at home most of the time. I think the question of justice is really what divides us as a country right now. Injustices to people on both sides, long unaddressed, are what fuel the fires of dissension – and the belief that those on the other side have no interest in healing the wounds. The concept of justice underlies our current health care battles, which seem to me like writhing snakes fighting to their deaths.
But really, the most interesting
word of the three is the conjunction “and.”
It’s not “or.” It’s not ambiguous.
“Liberty” and “justice” are conjoined; they belong together. We can’t choose between them: we need both.
One without the other is less than half; the promise of America is lost
without holding the two together, no matter how difficult that holding may be.
I’ve come to that understanding from
the Quaker concept of truth and love. Quakers
believe that you have to hold those two things, “truth” and “love”, together or
the promise of the faith is compromised. As one Friend, Muriel Bishop, has
written “Truth without love is violence. And love without truth is
sentimentality. We do need both.”
Freedom without justice means that
some people are not free. I can’t even
imagine what justice without freedom might be, perhaps because I was born into
a free country, luckier than most of the world’s population. Most of us would defend to the death each
person’s right to become a millionaire, but we balk when it comes to
challenging some inordinately wealthy people on their unfair business practices
or their abuses of labor. We take that
lying down, until the trampling mortifies our consciences. Then the struggle begins.
Independence is worth celebrating,
but liberty and justice take work. On
this 241st birthday of our nation, let’s commit to making it a
better year ahead.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trudy
Wischemann is a verbal freedom fighter who writes from her home in
Lindsay. You can send her your justice
war stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
comment below.
No comments:
Post a Comment