What are we thinking?

Even if we don't want to really think about the other three-quarters of humanity, our own little worlds are not completely up to snuff. Sure, most of you have more than enough, and believe me, I'm the last person who wants to take anything from you. I'm not a big fan of taking for taking's sake. That's simply wrong in my book. But, I question how right it is that some have more than they'll ever need and others don't have enough at all. Not only do we have this in our societies, we're getting ever more of it. Things aren't getting better, they're getting more disparate.

It's not a big step from disparity to desperation.

The way things are set up at the moment, it is perfectly legal for some people to have everything and other people to have absolutely nothing. But, just because something is legal doesn't make it right ... right in the sense of moral. We can sit back and say it is our corrupt politicians who skewed the game or the playing field or whatever, but in the end, whether we like it or not, we put them in office, we keep them there and they allow themselves to be bought and sold to the highest bidder, and we put our hands in our laps and tell each other, "Well, you can't fight city hall." Oh, how proud our parents must be of us now.

I would maintain that fairness is not the issue. "Life isn't fair" is perhaps one way to put it, for as we've seen, luck has a lot to do with a lot of things, and some folks have more luck than others. But, regardless of what unfairness there may be in the world, there is no reason that world in which we live should not be just. Justice and fairness are two different things. And, when I speak of "justice", I don't mean anything near "legal". Things may be legal, but that doesn't make them just.

The Romans made the distinction in having different words for laws. The word lex was used to describe human law (and it is from this word that our own "legal" derives); the word ius was used to describe divine law, a higher law (and it is from this word that our own "justice" derives). We materialistic moderns, of course, have banned anything divine from our lives, but even in our rather basic mundanity, we know that there is something "more" than the mere legal. We've got more than enough lawyers to tell us all about that, but what we are missing, I believe, are a few good people to tell us about what is just.

I would like to think that we're all capable of figuring that out, if not individually perhaps together, but I'm finding it increasingly difficult to find anyone who is willing to take the time to even think about it. Oh, I run into more than enough opinions, that's for sure, but unfortunately too many of those are simply an excuse for thinking instead of a result of it.