Justice

This week I promised you some shorts about Justice, Awe, Beauty, Roots and Community.

When I think of justice, these kid stories come to mind...Think of it as free association- associating a word with a story. You can probably come up with some of your own.

We were sitting in the bleachers at one of our homecoming games (our public city school vs suburban/city/country Christian School). This particular city school won the sportsmanship awards over the other city schools, 3 Protestant Christian schools, and at least two Catholic schools. They were well deserved.

At this particular game, there was a little boy in the bleachers from the Christian school we were playing. At this particular moment, he was exceptionally rude to someone from our city school. The mom watched and did nothing. She didn't intervene. She didn't correct him or tell him it was wrong to treat other people that way. Someone might say she didn't see it. Maybe she was encouraging her child to be more assertive or something. Bottom line, she allowed the behaviour, so apparently it didn't violate anyone's sense of wrong-doing except mine and the student who patiently tolerated the rudeness.

Another story: Once, we were standing in line at a coffee shop in Houston with family members. I noticed a 6 year old ahead of us picking on his little brother maybe 3 years old. Either the parents didn't notice or they didn't care, I don't know. I noticed my nephew ( around 5) also watching these little boys and I watched his acute sense of justice and injustice growing more and more angry. My brother saw it, too.

All of a sudden my nephew jumped to the defence of this little stranger in-the-face of that older brother. If we hadn't been watching the whole scene develop it would have looked like my nephew was picking a fight. My brother jumped in before my nephew's profound sense of justice triumphed over wrong and caused a bigger problem.

(c) 2005 Margie Hillenbrand