I believe in justice. I’m not referring to the justice of the American legal system but true justice. The Greeks called it “Themes”, the blind woman with the scales often depicted in court rooms and legal buildings. The irony of blind justice in America is that more often than not it is not blind to the color of a man’s skin, the number of piercings in his ears or how many tattoos he has peaking out of his collar or shirt sleeve. Few hands are resistant to slickening, and a single childhood mistake could send a man away for life.

When I was little, my mom hooked me on cop shows. A reoccurring theme I noticed even that young was that the meanest looking person was always assumed as a suspect from the very beginning, and yet somehow it turned out to be the upright citizen who’d never missed a tax deadline before in their life, and even had the all American dream waiting at him with an apple pie in the oven. A five year old can tell knows that it’s not nice to judge someone by the way they look. Every day when I saw the kid with glasses and a book sitting away from the others in the playground, wondered why everyone picked on them. When I became that kid, it felt like I was going undercover and seeing the other side of things. Suffice to say, I didn’t gain any understanding. In middle school it boggled my mind that a haircut would actually define someone’s social class within the hundreds of cliques that roamed and intermingled within the halls. The look or a girl’s friends actually brought up questions as to whether she was easy or not.
High school has barely brought any more understanding. Because a boy’s friends smoked pot, did he? Because someone wore a skirt that was little too short once or twice, did that mark her as a slut? I have no answer to these questions, and they plague me every time I walk through the doors of my school.
The legal system in this country is not perfect, and neither are the people that run it. Justice was not created by the people thought. It was made by some higher power that we can not understand and someone was smart enough to give the making of wrongs right a name. That name is justice. While it is not always blind, in the end there is always true justice. In the end of the grand scheme of things, there is blind justice. May a man die the way he lived in his heart. Call it karma, call it God, call it whatever you wish. I believe of the justice not of the court, or even of the people, but of the justice of the blind, for they see what we can. They see the hearts of the people. I believe in justice, true justice for all