THE GOOD & THE BAD
We shape the world and the world shapes us.
In Nature, the good and wholesome plants outnumber
the poisonous 100 to one; Walking down a city
street, the good people outnumber the bad by at least
a thousand to one; And yet, we’re all prisoners of this
wrong side of the devil’s percentage, defeated before
we even begin, held captive by our own self-created
fear, unwilling to trust, to taste but once, the pure
waters of the abundant good that surrounds us.
TWO SPECIES OF PROBLEM
There are those problems that Mother Nature simply
“throws at us,” like the ever-present need for water,
food, shelter, and clothing, together with those
sure-to-come perennial calamities of flood and
drought. But there are also those problems which,
taken together, seem to form a radically different
species of difficulty. These are the problems which
are essentially self-made or man-made, and are clearly
far more difficult to resolve, far more potentially disastrous
and deadly. These are the problems of war, of waste,
of pollution, and of the cultures of self-serving ignorance
that sustain them.
ON THE TWO SIDES OF JUSTICE
“All virtue is injustice comprehended.” Greek aphorism,
quoted by Aristotle in Book V,
the Nicomachean Ethics
Justice always has two sides: One is protective; the other
is corrective. One protects the necessarily calm, rational,
neutral center of Democracy’s scales of equality; The other
corrects the imbalance of past injustices by helping the
suppressed, the exploited, and the disinfranchised obtain
the rights needed to fully flower in the clear light of Freedom.
If indeed “all virtue is injustice comprehended,” then it is
clear that the overly-narrow circle of concern we have drawn
in the past must now expand to correct the gross injustice
of not including the whole of Earth’s biosphere. In this view,
rivers have rights. Rivers are protected by first, doing no harm.
And in this view, if harm or injustice has been done by, say,
pollution or inappropriate dam-building, then this wider view
of justice demands that we correct these past mistakes
regardless of the short-term consequences to merely
“human-centric” economies. Just as the argument made
only 160 years ago, that ending slavery would hurt the
cotton industry horrifies us now, so too, in the future, will
perhaps the arguments that we need massive hydro projects
for electricity and flood control.