Justice

The definition of Justice in the Oxford Dictionary is ‘just behaviour or treatment’ and the quality of ‘being fair and reasonable’.

Injustice happens all the time; even at a very young age we can be subjected to injustice, and we meet it in many forms and from many people throughout our life. Injustice hurts badly, whether it is us involved or someone else we care about…………. injustice creates anger and pain and it is so hard to shake off.

I once worked with a woman who used to yell at me across our work section ‘You’ve done this wrong!’. It happened two or three times in one day; not only was it embarrassing that she was putting me down in front of the whole of our team, but the worst of it was that that I hadn’t done it wrong! She didn’t redress the balance by shouting ‘Oh sorry, you got it right – it’s me that was wrong!’ Oh no, of course she wouldn’t! On the third occasion, I took her into a quiet room and asked her, in future, to talk to me quietly if she thought I had made a mistake or had a problem with my work, and explained how it made me feel – and I pointed out that she didn’t rectify the situation in front of the team when she discovered I was right and how unfair that was. She looked a bit taken aback but later in the day she came to me and told me that she admired the way I had handled the whole situation and apologised for embarrassing me. In dealing with it this way I had stopped the injustice to me, but I hadn’t embarrassed her in the process, either…….as she had done with me. That took some doing.

We don’t always get justice in the end, sometimes we just have to let it go. But the only way to combat injustice is to be consistently honest and fair in whatever we do, so that when a crisis occurs we have already demonstrated the quality of who, and what, we are and people will make their own minds up about who is right or wrong based on that. So patience comes hand in hand with justice and the scales are tipping up and down on a daily basis – usually at the hands of someone else. If we can stand steady and stay calm, we can balance the scales with our own behaviours and then, with hope in our heart, Justice will prevail.

Patricia x