That justice sense
Where does it spring from?
I have a question for you this week: What sparked your sense of justice?
I ask because a few days ago I had a sudden realisation that I could recall the precise moment when my sense of justice and injustice ignited in me.
I was six years of age, in second class in primary school in Australia. To give you the full story, I need to go back one year before that to when I was five, and share a story I wrote that was first published in the online magazine, Tiny Memoir.
I was five when I committed the unforgiveable crime of letting my intelligence show. Cuisenaire rods—rectangles of coloured wood of varying lengths—were my undoing.
Miss Messenger had given each of us a box filled with the wooden pieces, tiny white cubes whose value was one, red sticks twice as long for two, all the way up to the long orange rods whose value was ten.
We were to use them to solve a page of sums, sums I could do in my head without recourse to external aids. I had jotted down the answers and then put the rods to the far more productive use of building miniature castles.
As I admired my creations Miss Messenger descended upon me, dragged me up by the arm, and hissed in my ear.
“How dare you make the others feel bad! You are a bully! You will use the rods to do your sums.”
The class looked at me, looked at my glorious castles, looked down at their pedestrian arrangements of red plus light green (three) equals yellow (five). There was nowhere to hide from the evidence of my crime. It would haunt me for decades.
Skip forward a year….
At school there was a girl in my class called Penny Kerr. Penny had broken her arm during the school holidays and she came back to class wearing a cast. Although she wasn’t one of my close friends, having a cast made Penny a bit of a celebrity for a while.
Several weeks after Penny had shed the cast, she and I were walking down the four sandstone steps outside the main school building. Penny was one step in front of me when she tripped and fell down the remaining stairs. I jumped down and helped her up.
Suddenly, two teachers—the aforementioned Miss Messenger and my second-grade form mistress, Miss Story—descended on me and dragged me away.
“You bully!” said Miss Messenger. “How dare you push Penny down the stairs—and then you pulled on her broken arm!”
I had not pushed Penny, nor had I remembered which of her now cast-less arms had been broken. Penny was sobbing and unable to come to my rescue and correct the record.
Miss Messenger took me to the large hall in the center of the school. “You’ll stand here until the headmistress can see you,” she said and left me there.
As I stood there, my indignation, my outrage at the wrongness of it, of being told I was a bully, of being falsely accused, grew and grew.
It grew until I finally walked out of the hall, went to the locker room, retrieved my little suitcase, and caught a bus home.
When my mother asked why I was home early, I explained and she phoned the headmistress.
I don’t know how that conversation went, but I never received an apology from either of the teachers, and throughout primary school my reports were always phrased as “Rosemary is exceptional in her studies and we are pleased to see that she is learning to control her tendency to bully.”
So the bully tag awarded to me by Miss Messenger for having the gall to do sums in my head followed me for years.
The question
When I think back to this episode over 60 years later, the outrage is still there in me, the minutiae of the incident etched into my being, and when I think about it now, I can clearly see that my sense of justice and of outrage at injustice were cemented in the core of my being at that time.
That justice sense burned within me, at such a cellular level, that for many years I assumed that everyone else must feel the same; I defined my own reality as the norm.
Of course, not everyone does feel this way, and for those who do, their stories are not the same as mine and often they have a much deeper and broader scope.
It made me wonder, where does your sense of justice and injustice come from?
Has it been with you since childhood? Has it been kindled by belonging to, or witnessing the mistreatment of, a group that is oppressed or exploited? Did your parents pass it on to you? Were you inspired by a mentor or teacher? Do your family and friends share a similar sense or has it passed them by?
What are the things that make us such defenders of those who are unjustly treated?
Believe it or not, I think it was my Christian upbringing. My parents wove a sense of justice into our Christianity. They were big on looking out for others less fortunate, and actually doing something about it. (ps obviously your teacher didn't know you at all Rose! )
What an awful teacher! No one who knows you for a minute would accuse you of being a bully. That teacher must have hated Mum perhaps? Sounds like at least it had one positive outcome.