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I have a rep for just saying things. Sometimes rightly, too often not so and yet there are things I can never post here, not ever.
So I can't say why, a few days ago, I went walking...then walking... and then it was three hours later and I had logged in a total four hours of exercise that day.
But I can tell you what I felt between two key points of that sojourn.
Point A: I wanted to beat somebody up, and I did not care who it was. I was that angry, that displaced from a long- and carefully-cultivated calm. I did have a specific person in mind but that of course was just not acceptable behavior. Nor was just shopping about for a random fight with a strange person. But believe me - I wanted to do inordinate random harm. That was the impulse.
I did not act on that impulse - for you see, that's kind of the whole point of what I cannot actually talk to you about. Someone I do not even know could not not act on aforementioned impulse - and it hurt my wife. And it hurt me. And for that reason, that night, I was killing angry.
Not the OMG WTF GRR FU kind but the cold, gathered death-could-ensue-kind.
So I walked a lot.
As I did so I reflected on this feeling of wrath. Is this how so many people go about their day, supersaturated in affront to the point that any little thing keys them up to a fight? As I walked I spotted some of the ubiquitous homeless personages of downtown Charlotte. As I walked further I approached the Metro Bus Terminal, recent site of a melee where many were injured and gunshots were fired. So much wrath.
But was it inchoate? Or.... is this even a word? Choate? OK, spell check says it most certainly is not but you get the idea.
Well, given my avowed inability to speak on the source of my fury, one supposes my wrath is inchoate.
So I thought of this in the context of people for whom this feeling is not the exception, rather the rule.
To go through life like this, always a matchstick and a pool of gasoline away from immolation.
I walk past the terminal. The sense of tentative panic lingers, the way people size each other up on a battlefield that still has some half-life left in it.
I walk on past the old courthouse, and look to my left up at the county jail, a huge solid Borg Cube of incarceration (only it is not technically cubical). Wrath, inchoate wrath. That's its citadel.
I walk down the far side of the street and approach the new county courthouse, a triangular high-rise of justice, directly opposite from the jail.
I think of how many times prisoners are brought forth from the left side of the street to the right, walked into the courtroom (through metal detectors of which I am familiar - as a jury pool participant that is), wait their turn at the bench (or the wheel, as they might see it) and then either shed of their manacles or walked straight back across the street to the first of their sunsets as convicted (sometimes again-convicted) persons. In the Citadel of Wrath.
What is justice to some of these? Do they thing, damn I screwed up, I have to accept my guilt and my punishment?
Thing is, even those who do, the jail term never ends. They serve their time, perhaps with distinction. But once out on the street again, their resume is one thing, now and forevermore: CONVICT.
Others, better qualified than I to do so, might remark on how for many Americans their skin is all the resume that employers need to see. This going both ways, both of them ugly as sin.
Wrath, wrath of all kinds.
And I arrive at Point B, the nearest apex of the vast high-rise triangle that is the county Hall of Justice.
It's quite the Third Millennium monument. The interior is a vast soaring plaza, soaring to the ceiling, boasting an immense chandelier-like display like rain from Heaven. It's a physically uplifting building... one might even overlook the superabundance of men and women in uniform with firearms and clear lawful authority to wield them at the drop of a hat.
But it's not inside the courthouse that I go. For I am transfixed. I have stopped walking.
On the exterior of the courthouse are panels with quotations from scholars, writers, thinkers and philosophers and wise sachems available to the Framers of the Constitution I've seen them in passing but on this day, I am caught by one right away:
"In justice we become one in our souls." - Cherokee
I think in truth I am not remembering this precisely but this was the spirit of the statement. And my mouth fell open.
In justice we become one in our souls."
What an amazing idea.
But the Cherokee, wise among the Five Civilized Nations as they were once called, do have peers in wisdom elsewhere:
Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy. - Psalm 82:3
And a local favorite:
Let knowledge be cherished, wherever freedom has arisen - the Mecklenburg Resolves (aka Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence)
And there were others but by then I was taken from a place of wrath - worthy of the citadel across the street - to the vestibule of a better place - Justice.
And the rest of my long walk was a reflection on this - that perhaps I had found something I have been looking for, something that Socrates, I think (also on the wall of the courthouse by the wall) called "a passion for justice".
A fire.
A fire, not for wrath but for justice.
A fire returned that had been reduced to ember for a long while.
I have let the rest of you do the writing; you were all doing it so well. I resigned myself that, like my now scarred ribs and ground-down knees, my writing too was a thing of the past. Something, like a baton, to pass to others.
I wondered if it was just for a time. Did I really have anything fresh and interesting and useful to say about the politics of these latter days?
I don't know about all that.
But I took the time on a very horrible day to take stock of what I felt, why I felt it, what the options are, and unwittingly set my course for the one place that made the distinction between Wrath and Justice clear as day: the county jail on one side of the street, and the county courthouse on the other.
Those of us who write here - all of us - have the luxury of, when we find ourselves at Point A, to make that sojourn to Point B.
All of us here have that option, that reserve, that insight and educated choice - to cross the street, pass out of the dark shut-in Citadel of Wrath and take comfort in the high uplifting spaces of the Seat of Justice.
That's not to say we always will. We certainly don't do so always.
But we know we can. And we know we can do better, with every day.
A passion for justice.
A cherishing of knowledge.
A guardianship of the needy.
In these sacred just and awesome tasks
We are one.
_
Late but not forgotten, Today's Top Comment Nominations!!
From twigg:
In response to the suggestion that "Left Libertarians could be a political force to be reckoned with, this comment by fblau made me laugh out loud.
From trashablanca:
bubbanomics consistently posts some of the funnies pics on Daily Kos, and today was no exception. This is from the top of his thread but keep scrolling until you get to Lou Costello's amusing undies.
From Crashing Vor:
There were lots of funny comments to my diary Sesame Street Makes You Gay, but it was Loge who best demonstrated the equation of pure satire: funny + true.
From JanF:
In gchaucer2's diary about New Jersey Medicaid change, when dmhlt 66 suggests that Chris Christie does a great John Travolta imitation (with photo ... sorry), Nedsdag has a great punch line .