jus•tice jŭs′tĭs

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• n. The quality of being just; fairness.
• n. The principle of moral rightness; decency.

More at Wordnik from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

As usual for my writings, the above was gotten by going to my favorite search engine (DuckDuckGo) and searching using the expression, “justice definition.”

I watch and listen to, various individuals in the course of a typical day. Besides getting a smattering of less biased news than I would if I were to listen to the better-known sources, I also get delineated opinion.

That is to say, the same persons who give me the news, often share how they feel and think about what was just proffered. The person generally makes a clear distinction when stepping out of the story, and into his or her viewpoint.

Yesterday, while watching one such video, I heard a word repeated, and it made me wonder how many people have really taken the time to think about that term.

The word in question—as you might’ve guessed looking at the beginning of this article and its title—was “justice.”

When I initially began to write this piece, it started life with the title, “Justice” as opposed to “And Justice for All.” As I got thinking about things though, it came to me that what most people seem to lack, is a perspective that considers justice something that should apply equally to everybody.

You might say that those out there supposedly fighting for fairness and morality for the marginalized, believe that’s true. For my part, that’s not how I see things playing out.

More often than not, “social justice warriors” become laser focused on the population they believe to be under served in the department of what they see as equity—as fairness.

In their pursuit of an improved situation for the person or persons they seek to undergird, they appear to lose the ability to see how they’re affecting the remainder of the World.

One modern day example, is the Black Lives Matter movement. Though their message is not by any means limited to the discussion of those black folks who’ve been killed in their minds unjustly by police, that’s a large part of their messaging with regard to those they seek to support.

Here’s where the problem begins to rear its ugly head.

It seems to me, it’s been the tendency of BLM, to skew their outlook so that the black person killed in a confrontation with law enforcement is invariably the victim of injustice.

So when Trayvon Martin was killed—who, as I’ve indicated before, wasn’t even killed by a cop—George Zimmerman is the evildoer and Mr Martin is a saint.

Anyone having done research, will be absolutely unwilling to couch Mr Zimmerman as some sort of vision of holiness. He was and is anything but that. I suppose the same can be said for me.

Further, it seems that for the most part, if not entirely, Mr Martin wasn’t anything close to Satan incarnate. He seems largely to have been just a young man, navigating the pitfalls and foibles of youth.

Since neither appears to have been a particularly horrible human being, the question of what occurred, can be asked without imputing those qualities to the players, as it were.

Considering this, what I’d like to know first about that situation, would have to be, “Was George Zimmerman a racist?” As far as I’m able to tell, the answer is a pretty certain, “No.”

By the way, when you look into most other situations cited by organizations like BLM, the same query posed, seems to result in the exact same answer.

Put simply, the fact that the person killed was a black person (typically man), seems not to be a factor.

Having dispensed with that aspect of things, the next question looks to be pretty basic. It is, “What actually happened?”

You would think this would be an easy interrogative to answer, but it rarely is.

It’s almost always true that what looks to have occurred, isn’t what actually did take place.

This is certainly true in the interaction between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman.

The narrative forwarded early on in this case as I heard it, went something like this.

“A young black man, who was running from a local security guard, was gunned down in cold blood when he confronted the man who had been following him.”

Since then, facts have emerged that totally change the character of the exchange.

The story as I know it today sounds more like this.

“A young man, who didn’t live in the community, but was visiting a family member there, was walking in a residential area for which Mr Zimmerman was a security person.

Mr Zimmerman had been made aware that someone had been performing potentially criminal mischief in the neighborhood.

Not knowing who Mr Martin was, when he saw him in his travels, he followed him, to see if he could ascertain what the young man in question was doing.

At some point, Mr Martin hid from Mr Zimmerman.

Mr Zimmerman continue to attempt to determine his whereabouts.

In the process of seeking the youngster out, Mr Zimmerman went past the spot where Mr Martin was concealed.

Mr Martin jumped out from his hiding spot and knocked Zimmerman to the ground, where he landed on concrete. At this point, Trayvon Martin was on top of George Zimmerman.

Mr Martin then began to beat George Zimmerman with his fists, pounding the back of his head into the concrete when he did so.

Zimmerman—fearing for his life—pulled his sidearm and fired at point-bank range on Mr Martin.

Mr Martin perished as a result of at least one gunshot wound.”

Is this story a sad one? Indubitably, yes.

That being said, if the account given was correct, I see no injustice here.

The point is, in this tale and many others currently in the news and on social media, the facts one initially hears, often look nothing like the final story that comes out. Investigations typically follow such occurrences. Sometimes they prove the person killed was innocent of any wrongdoing. Largely though, that’s not at all the case. It certainly doesn’t appear true in the aforementioned event. In this country, the ask is in that line of the Pledge of Allegiance, “With liberty and justice for all.” At present, that isn’t what seems to be happening.

Thanks for reading, and may your time be good.