Bring Back the Blindfold

ME OR US

 

Justice is blindfolded.  She is not blind, just ‘blindfolded.’  And for good reason.

She is also impartial, because she is blindfolded.  She weighs cases according to law, and she carries the sword of judicial ‘execution’ should it be required.

But we have taken her blindfold off, tampered with the scales (what is ‘truth’ anyway), and broken the sword – or replaced it with a wooden spoon (and even that is contentious).

In divesting her of the blindfold we have blinded her, so that justice becomes judgment based on extenuating circumstances, fuelled by behavioral irresponsibility and the toxic notion of sentimentality, in which people are all victims and not perpetrators, and certainly never responsible.

Justice can no longer ‘see.’  She can no longer stand back, and look past an individual, and look towards the community. And it is for the community that law exists to foster cohesion and parameter.  The law effects me, guides me, and protects me but it wasn’t written just for me – it is a community consideration crafted by greater minds than those who happily dismantle it in a sympathetic attempt at ‘understanding.’

She, justice, is ‘press ganged’ into feeling an empathy with a litigant as though the litigant is to set the tone for the law rather than the law set the tone for the litigant – for all of us.

I posit the reason is that the drift into individuality with its attendant ‘rights’ has hamstrung an instrument that was created for a community’s wellbeing.  I now matter rather than us.

The law simply won’t be her self unless we replace the blindfold and allow impartiality (a philosophically impossible task we know but not for this reason jettisoned) to weigh a case.

And my feelings are not good arbiters, neither are a person’s feelings the hand that should guide justice in her pursuit of, of … justice.  Ah, I had all but forgotten that word.  So has everyone else – until, of course, they are aggrieved and need the law or are carpeted by the law.  It is then that the blindfold is indeed welcomed.

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