So Very Tired

Woke up at 5:30 AM.

Drove to Oklahoma.

Must. Write. Initial contribution. To conference roundtable. Before tomorrow.

But...so very tired...

This may not happen tonight, lol. 

My brain is emptied of smart things to say today, so I'll link to one of my favorite passages from Kelsey Piper:

I’ve written about this before, but I think the entire concept of ‘justice’, when it gets used to mean ‘hurting people who ‘deserve’ it for the satisfaction of their victims’, is an incredibly fucked-up, damaging, and unhealthy way to approach the world. It’s a natural instinct which many people feel, and no one is a bad person for feeling it, but not everything we feel is a true guide to how the world should be, and the world should be one in which everyone is flourishing. Hurting people is terrible; hurting people because they deserve it is evil. If someone needs other people to be hurt so they can flourish, I want us to never, ever accommodate that, as a society, because I think wants like that need to be handled in a fashion other than granting them. When we have a just society, we will have a society that never, ever hurts or kills people because they ‘deserve’ it or because other people will be happier if they suffer or happier if they die.

 Whenever I get down on myself or hateful about other people, this passage by a non-religious person grounds me in one of the essentials of my faith. Suffering is bad. Causing suffering is bad. Justice has to mean something other than causing suffering, even it the intention is to prevent future suffering.

Some day, when I'm not so very tired, I'll try to think through how this passage speaks in conversation with the Crucifixion.

More (but probably not a lot more) tomorrow,

JF