Fandango’s Provocative Question #77

It’s another round of provocative questioning from Fandango. Today’s question involves blind justice. 

I have never believed that our system of justice was genuinely just. I don’t think a lot of our laws are just and didn’t think so even when I was a child.

How could a country founded on slavery have real justice? We had to have a war to free those slaves, but that wasn’t enough. Everything we’ve tried to do to create equality has failed. Blind justice? Deaf, dumb, racist — and for sale for the right price. It has always been obvious that those who have enough money get away with murder. The poor were lucky to escape prison for smoking a joint.

Now, of course, smoking joints is mostly legal, except at the federal level where it is still a crime and there are tens of thousands, maybe millions of pot smokers in jail for something that’s now legal. Then there are millions of poor people, colored and pale in prison because they couldn’t afford a decent lawyer.

It doesn’t mean that none of the poor or brown or black or tan people didn’t commit a crime. Maybe they did, but considering all the other issues — poverty, color, being in some other way “different” or in the wrong place,  it’s hard to tell. Add that to district attorneys who are determined to get guilty verdicts because that’s how they get promoted. Here and everywhere in this country, our system of justice is “pay as you go.” I know that race is a big issue, but I think the real bottom-line evil is money. Rich folks don’t have to obey the same laws we do. If, by some chance a very wealthy person gets nicked by the cops for something — like massive fraud, for example — they have that special color that enable freedom for even the worst criminals: money, which in this country, is green.

A really rich black person will win over a very poor person of any other color person because money almost always wins. We are shocked to our boot straps when the rich lose in court.

Americans believe that greed is good, that there’s no such thing as too much money, that we all deserve as much as we can get any way we can get it. It’s not in our constitution, but it’s deeply part of our culture.

If we don’t get past it, we will wind up a species without a planet, let alone a government.

Author: Marilyn Armstrong

Opinionated writer with hopes for a better future for all plus a big helping of cynicism. View all posts by Marilyn Armstrong