Climbing off the Bench

U.S. District Judge David Carter takes photos at the homeless encampment along the Santa Ana River in Anaheim.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

David Carter cares enough about justice to climb off his bench, roll up his sleeves, see for himself, and issue creative rulings that help make a difference.  This Orange County Federal judge has insisted that the county plan to empty the Santa Ana river of homeless people (the encampment numbered at one point as many as 900 people) must be done humanely and respectfully.  In order to understand the problem, he walked the riverbed personally, engaging city and county officials and homeless people in conversation.  While no long term solution to the county's skyrocketing homeless population is in sight, at least in the short term, somebody with legal power cares about the rights and dignity of the people involved.

Read the whole story at:
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-judge-carter-profile-20180220-story.html#nws=mcnewsletter

Finer Music

Excerpts from Zadie Smith, at a speech in Germany in 2016, from the essay collection Feel Free. Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive. People who believe in fundamental and irreversible changes in human nature are themselves ahistorical and naive. If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world — and most recently in America — the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind. Here in Germany you will remember these martial songs; they are not a very distant memory. But there is no place on earth where they have not been played at one time or another. Those of us who remember, too, a finer music must try now to play it, and encourage others, if we can, to sing along.

Love and Justice

Love and justice.  We need both.  Love doesn't mean feeling a certain way. It means actions that care for others.  Justice doesn't mean an abstract notion of fairness, or punishing transgressors, but a system of government, laws, policy, enforcement, and public sentiment that prioritizes the well-being of all over the privileges of some.

We can disagree over specifics, but when we take one short step back from concrete policies to the values behind them, our blind spots come clear.  Just after a friend told me that his nephew had been shot dead by a relative, the New York Times reported that January 23rd had seen the eleventh school shooting in 2018.  To our shame as a country, we have failed to protect all citizens in order to privilege a virtually unregulated use of lethal objects by a few, and the profits of those who equip them.

While this injustice remains, love is at work. In a Momastery blog post called, "Share this with all the schools, please" Glennon Doyle explains the systematic efforts, over years, of one math teacher to identify and remedy the kind of alienation among her students that could lead to another Columbine-style school shooting.  With math! And love.
http://momastery.com/blog/2014/01/30/share-schools/.