Recent Rabbit Holes 3

Is True Justice Just a Fantasy?

On Instagram the other day, I came across a post about LaVena Johnson. It would have been her 41st birthday that day. Her family surpassed 20 years without her, when she only lived 19 years to begin with. What a horrendous milestone to endure with no justice for the utterly disturbing and heinous abuse and murder she faced at the hands of a fellow U.S. soldier. I will not describe what happened to her here, but I will say that it was so upsetting, that it sent me down a rabbit hole trying to learn more about her. My brain was probably trying to add context to the horrible information I had been confronted with.

There seem to be no updates about her case at this time and minimal chance of her/her family ever receiving justice. I came across a page (Stanford University "Say Their Names") listing and discussing a very small, but still too large portion of black people throughout history who have been victims of violence and injustice. 330 names, 65 stories, 3 explicit and extreme stories of systemic racism. And this is a tiny percentage of the stories that are actually out there.

I started to wonder if it was even possible to categorically list all of the people who have been brutally murdered because of racism and imperialism. No of course not. And for all those forgotten, lost names, there will never be justice. Karma never did it's job for them.

Naturally, we all know that this world is unfair, we've all heard this since childhood, but is it not possible to make the world fair if we all actually wanted to?

At the moment at which you sit with the gravity of one situation, put yourself in the shoes of the family and loved ones; then you multiply that pain by thousands. Millions of you expand to other tragic miscarriages of justice– at the moment, how do you accept that there is no true justice in the world? How do I live in a world that generally functions in opposition to my morals and the deepest wish of my soul, which is to see justice for victims and survivors of any kind? How do people withstand the kind of pain that we are forced to witness and bear as human beings?