Is it more important to seek Justice, or is it more important to heed injustice? To heed is to pay close attention to, to give it its due regard, to make peace with, to respect. This thought behind forbearance is its greater potential for reason and propriety. As much as I dislike it, injustice always has been and, (I believe, at least in my lifetime), always will be an unavoidable superhighway running through, around, under, and over varying segments and factions of Humanity. So it makes some sense to try and reason with it. By definition injustice is wrong, yet in this country we defend it and we perpetuate it daily. By definition justice includes “equitable distribution of resources and participation in decision-making,” yet in this country justice has come to mean entitlement. By definition entitlement is an injudicious assumption. By our definition equity is rhetorical bombast.

So if I respect injustice I am excusing it, I am giving in, I am adding to its credibility. But to seek Justice is perceived as scorn, rejection, or disregard by the proponents of injustice, and I am perceived as not taking its proponents seriously. And because it is injustice and because on some level to some degree its proponents know it is wrong, to add my disdain onto that is to add fuel to their fire creating further division. Today this is the nature of our country's politics where one side is justified in their mushrooming injustice and the other side is okay maintaining status quo by not walking their talk. And until someone or some faction or some thing comes to enough power and is not afraid to see actual Justice through, we will continue to be divided, and we will continue to spew word vomit that defends and/or perpetuates.

Back to my original question. If I seek Justice I am widening the divide and encouraging injustice. If I heed injustice I am justifying and substantiating and maintaining. So instead of working together for justice, rising above our natural tendencies toward power and division, almost all of us have accepted and many of us have embraced an inevitability of injustice and we temper the disappointment by recharacterizing justice as entitlement, giving us a self-righteous path forward.

Regarding this interplay between justice and injustice, my most egregious mistake is thinking I can find justice. If I were able to heed personal injustice AND somehow seek and make inroads toward more widespread, equitable justice for all, (that sounds familiar), then perhaps I would be less inclined to pretend that entitlement is justice. To do this, I must first understand the difference between entitlement and justice.

Entitlement:

1. If i have good things come my way, i deserve them.
2. If you have good things come your way, you are lucky.
3. If I have bad things come my way, it is due to circumstance beyond my control.
4. If you have bad things come your way, you made your bed - and you deserve your punishment.

Interesting to note here that in this country our system of justice in practice, is and always has been a system of entitlement, applying #3 to favored factions and #4 to those not like us.

A better path toward Justice:

1. If we have good things come our way, we consider ourselves lucky and we share the wealth.
2. If we have bad things come our way, we listen closely, and we learn to better influence circumstance.

There is a huge difference between ‘I' and ‘we’. ‘I’ has considerable difficulty contextualizing ‘we’ whereas (in theory) ‘we’ intuitively understands that ‘I’ is the same as ‘we’. Unfortunately, we are not the theoretical ‘we’ - we are a bunch of human ‘I's’ pretending to be a ‘we’.

Seeking personal justice will invariably lead me to entitlement and that will invariably detract from seeking widespread, equitable justice for all so I must consciously and actively separate the two by realizing that because I am human I will forever struggle to put ‘we’ before ‘I’. And now I am back to finding someone or some faction or some thing to take power and lead us toward Justice. But today's political and economic facts will maintain entitlement and today's power will not let go. I previously said my most egregious mistake is thinking I can find justice. I should qualify that by saying my most egregious mistake is thinking I can find personal justice.