“Governments can remain in power in the face of plague, famine or war, but none has been able to survive revolutions based on demands for human dignity and justice.”
Our Quote of the Week holds an important insight: a political system may withstand internal conflicts and challenges from the outside, but it cannot withstand the union of people coming together to stand up for their fundamental human dignity and justice.
This week’s speech is Sargent Shriver’s 1971 Address to the Trial Lawyers’ Association. The speech focuses on the need to create a just society for everyone. An attorney by profession, Shriver spoke frequently to his peers about their role in creating a more just, prosperous and peaceful society. In this particular case, Shriver makes the point that injustice is unbearable, worse than hunger, and a cause of ultimate despair than can bring us to rebellion:
“Injustice is more unbearable than hunger, injustice causes more dope addiction than the greed of the producers and pushers of heroin because injustice creates the customers — those who have lost hope in everything. Injustice sows the seeds of rebellion. [...] Injustice — rather than hunger — created and nurtured both the French and American revolutions. Even today, the undercurrents which are precipitating violent changes are movements by men seeking to achieve justice, not to eradicate hunger. Fear, frustration, anger and anxiety motivate men far more than a loaf of bread.”
Shriver focuses on the transformation that must happen within every branch of the legal system in order to create a more just society, from legal education to the criminal justice system to the judiciary. He says that such a transformation is necessary to bring justice to every institution:
“I suggest that we need to extend our basic awareness of justice and injustice into institutions where courts and lawyers rarely wander. To the public schools where children are often subjected to abusive and arbitrary treatment in the name of discipline; to hospitals and mental institutions where patients are neglected or experimented upon or deprived of benefits; to governmental bureaucracies where people who blow ‘ethical whistles’, as Ralph Nader says, are subjected to subtle or not—so—subtle retaliation; to unions where jobs are denied because of race or sex; to corporations which exert as many controls on our lives as any governmental power, but stand outside the sphere of public accountability. We must begin to find ways to establish justice within the confines of those closed systems—those institutions which encompass much of our daily lives as students employees, or citizens—and we must see that injustice is eradicated in these privileged sanctuaries.”
Of course, we do not need to be attorneys to participate in the creation of a more just society. As citizens, one simple but powerful action we can take to ensure justice in government is to vote for candidates who value justice. During these midterm elections, may we join the quest for a more just society by casting a ballot for candidates who uphold justice by protecting our rights and acting in the best interest of all people.
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