A Sense of Fairness

Today was a meditative day and with it came a realization.  I set out this morning to wander - my intention was to just wander, do what occurred to me, as it occurred to me and give my brain time to find it's own way around the work challenges I have been experiencing.

The day itself flowed smoothly - coffee and birdsong at dawn (thinking of T.R.), breakfast with the guys at the Hickory Pit, then helping my friend Don dispose of his e-waste.  From there, I connected with Tony and drove him around for a while as he looked for an apartment (not a lot of luck there). A market stop for fresh fruit and salad materials, then off to see "Beast of the Southern Wild" and have dinner at Outback with Don.

Side-track, "Beasts of the Southern Wild" is an excellent movie - I highly recommend it if you are into art films.

Then, home for the evening where I am watching "Wild West's Most Wanted" which is amusing.

During the course of the day I came to the realization of what it is at work that gets under my skin about the current big project I am working on.  It offends my sense of fairness (proportional justice). In this particular project, because of the chaos associated with it, people are being routinely asked to go above and beyond - in terms of tasks, in terms of total hours, etc.  Yet, it is my perception that it is entirely a one way street - people are being asked to go above and beyond, but management is not responding by rewarding them above and beyond.

That definitely offends my sense of fairness. Now, the question is, what do I do about it from here.  Often though, knowing what lays at the heart of something is what allows us to work our way through it.  I hope this realization helps me.

Set Aside Justice...

"Set aside justice and what are Kingdoms but enterprises of robbery." St. Augustine, City of God

I have charged full-speed into a few windmills over the course of my life. Somewhere along the line, I developed a strong sense of justice under the law, that argument that above all other things all persons ought to be treated fairly, given the circumstances.

I am, perhaps to my detriment, an advocate of proportional justice. I believe that there is a balance in the universe and that in order to sustain that balance people need to actively seek and support justice. Proportional justice can be summed up as "an eye for an eye" and that may not be the best approach to justice. I arrive at proportional justice from exposure to the pragmatic realities of life - that unjust individuals are willing to exploit the systems and procedures of the just for their own unjust ends, which is why I feel any attempts at an absolute justice are naive at best and manipulative at worst.

Oh, I most certainly believe in the power and importance of forgiveness. Forgiveness is a healing act. But, I also believe that in order to be forgiven a person must repent AND provide the appropriate, acceptable, level of restitution to make the aggrieved part whole again and so fulfill the fundamental requirements of proportional justice. So things are easier to forgive then others. Some things cannot be forgiven.

That sense of proportional justice has been on my mind for the last couple of days, what it means, what it entails, what it obligates. I don't have any answers, just thoughts, prompted by the incidents of life. The whole train of thoughts was prompted by a rather small “almost mistake” at work that got me thinking along the lines that sometimes injustice is allowed to arise with the best of intentions. We design systems and processes and procedures with good (that is to say just) actors in mind, and yet those systems can be exploited by bad (unjust) actors. Consequently, we must design into our systems, processes and procedures, the safe-guards necessary to ensure that the systems cannot be co-opted by the unjust.