Partisan Tribalism And Injustice

Courtesy NY Magazine

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.   Martin Luther King, Jr

Despite our efforts to eradicate them, the indelible memories are those of distasteful, pernicious events implanted in the our minds return, often unannounced, flooding our thoughts with the same emotions we experienced when they occurred.

For me, the most hated, unpleasant of memories is that of the unforgettable stench of racism and xenophobia which permeated life as a teen during the nineteen-fifties and sixties.  Hovering in the air like a poisonous gas surreptitiously invading our souls the moment we disregarded the dangers and breathed in the noxious fumes of bigotry.  The poison didn’t just exist, it thrived when I was young.  For decades we erroneously thought it was subdued, relegated to the dark, foul sewage that is bad memories.  However; in truth, it was simply laying in wait to continue its destructive invasion, awaiting willing hosts to spread to spread it among the unwitting.

Bigotry’s twin, injustice, seemed to wane a bit as well, but together they now creep along the paths of humanity, seeking the slightest of opportunities to infect.

Well camouflaged amongst assumption and opinion, injustice is unconditionally destructive to individuals and entire civilizations deluded by its capricious nature as it worms into the cracks and crevices created by naïveté and opinion.

Capitalizing on those naive and opinionated are those who seek to advance their self-serving agendas. The guilty, the sanctimonious and the egotistical, using rhetorical dogma and diversion to segregate themselves from truth and justice, attempt to create the illusion that justice is injustice for them, thereby perverting justice for all.

In what has become a political circus in our nation’s capital, we witness, virtually every day, attempts to pervert justice. Yet; even more worrisome are those utterly blinded by acceptance of unfounded, fallacious claims of “justice”.

We’ve grown accustomed to watching justice unfold before our eyes in the various forms of media.  Likewise; we’ve grown accustomed to inserting our opinions, judging juries, and denigrating the courts.  But justice must remain blind; it cannot be commutated using hegemony and opinion disguised as justice and it must be allowed to run its course, despite our discomfort with the outcome.

As we watch our elected officials attempt to disrupt and thwart justice for the sake of partisan dogma, take care that your own patrimonial naïveté, brought about by the same tribalistic partisanship, doesn’t permit the worms of injustice to creep into and consume your mind, for injustice can easily disguises itself as justice, living comfortably among the complacent.