There's no such thing as Justice

I can't understand why everyone is so upset about the verdict of the recent Casey Anthony trial. How do all these people know what was really going on? Why are they so angry about it? Does it affect them personally?

It's horribly upsetting and a real tragedy in my mind that people are so cruel. Hasn't this woman been through enough? She doesn't need prison, not our kind of prison, anyway... SHE NEEDS HELP!!!

People only commit crimes for one reason; to get attention. People crave attention almost more than anything else and people who are forced into desperate situations, or at least desperate within their own minds, have the capacity to commit a crime in order to get attention, and boy does our "justice" system give it to them! Look at all the attention this case is getting, in fact, I'm giving it more attention as I'm writing this.

Why is our society so obsessed with this vague idea of justice... I don't think it's justice at all... it's COMMUNALLY VALIDATED REVENGE... that's not JUST at all... we're a bunch of monsters to condone this system. We have to fess up that our system for dealing with criminals IS NOT KIND OR JUST.

I love the system they have in the land of OZ... of course this only works in most of "our" cases b/c of course our laws aren't perfect, like the laws the wonderful Ozma sets down. However, the attitude is totally applicable.

Take the young boy named Ojo who illegally picked a 7-leafed clover. He did so in order to save his uncle/caretaker from being a stone statue forever. The reason this act was illegal in the first place was to prevent magic from being done by those who would use it for mischief, or in other words: in order to prevent just such accidents from occurring.
Once discovered, Ojo is taken to prison, where he is treated kindly, and with remorse for his desperate condition. Ozma herself offers to do all in her power to save Ojo's uncle. Ojo is stunned by the kindness showed to him, and of course he meant no harm. In his mind it was the right thing to try to save his loving uncle. Wouldn't we do the same?

What if we could be a little more kind in our system? Wouldn't we be a better nation, a better world, if we took a little more time to listen to others, and stop being so accusative?

I AM NOT SAYING that we should have anarchy. On the contrary, I am saying we need a system for helping people in desperate situations. But shamefully, throwing people in prison makes a lot of money. If only we could be less obsessive, we'd save the real things we do have, without needlessly destroying them in haste and anger. Money means nothing without the things it buys, and greed is a fool's route to destruction.

Now you might say, WELL OJO WASN'T A MURDERER... that's fair I suppose, but the principle is the same. Would a rational person commit murder? Would you murder someone? Would you kill someone unless you were in a desperate situation? What if you thought you were in a desperate situation?

Even people who on the surface seem totally horrifying in their actions have either rationalized those actions to themselves, and/or are in serious psychological distress.

There is a difference between putting someone in a corner and teaching them that they can't always get what they want, and that they need to consider the feelings of others, and building a culture based on later breaking the essential code of considering the feelings of others as soon as someone starts to act out.

We are constantly lead to believe our world is in horrible distress all the time, and almost all the news we see is about wars, or murders, or other acts of violence. The world is not as bleak a place as it may seem on the news. To paraphrase John Lennon, peace is here if you want it, and so is kindness.