The myth of justice for all

If you don't have shared values; if you erroneously believe that you can do everything yourself; if you refuse to recognize that where and when we are born has a lot to say about what's even possible in our lives; if the notion of personal responsibility is perverted into a justification that it's your own fault if things are better for you; and if you believe that only the individual is capable of anything positive; it is, well, simply beyond my ability to imagine, let alone comprehend, how you can think that we're all treated equally in the eyes of the law.

In the United States, money is free speech, though there's no hint of that in the First Amendment. In the Western World in general, there is the legal precedent that social standing, background or history, may not be considered in assessing your standing in society. For anyone who wants to see -- and I realize that means "damn few" -- it is clear that different measures are applied to different individuals in our everyday reality.

To me, the most emblematic, the most telling, the strongest statement of the negation of the notion of "justice for all" is the notion of "affluenza". Don't get me wrong, I'm quite a fan of linguistic dynamics, of the ability of a language to change and adapt to the world around it, of neologisms, and more, but "affluenza" ... well, that one, I must admit, stopped me in my tracks.

It was, I believe, a judge in Texas (otherwise not known for its forward-thinking decisions) who declared that a young man who was drugged and drunk and who drove into a crowd of people, killing several of them, was, in fact, innocent (and sentenced accordingly) because he suffered from "affluenza": he came from such a rich family, that he was no longer able to determine the difference between wrong and right. It wasn't an isolated incident; the defense has been successfully invoked since then. How, in the name of all that's holy, does that make any sense at all? How can money absolve you from moral responsibility? Well, in a "society" in which the only real value is money, money talks, and the guilty walk.

There was no outrage. There were no demonstrations against the injustice. There was no outcry, no anguish, no speechlessness, unless you take the silence that thundered across the land as speechlessness. It was just another day in paradise, just more business as usual, another instance of "nothing to see here". It passed as good as unnoticed. And all of us, whether you like it or not and whether you want to admit it or not, had our hands stained with blood that day. Some community service, a few hours doing something for others so that maybe, just maybe, it starts to dawn on you that there are other people on this planet other than yourself ... that was it.

On the same day, not a small number of people of color were frisked, searched, pulled over from traffic, arrested, incarcerated, sent to prison, and executed for alleged crimes that they may or may not have committed. (When you have an error rate of 5-10% of innocent people being executed, you can't really claim anything for the "system" other than it doesn't work.) And there was no outrage, no demonstrations, no outcry, no anguish, no speechlessness, just business as usual.

You're a person of color in America, you're an immigrant, most likely Muslim, here in Europe. You're different in that you are not what we aspire to be. Too many want to suffer from affluenza. They dream of it. They long for it. Justice should be blind, but only so long as she doesn't see me.