Social Justice in our Times

Beyond the Graffiti

My father came home on day and informed us that there was a cholera outbreak in Malacca and everyone was to go get an inoculation at the government clinic. My mother was in a state of heightened anxiety. She had grown up in the backwoods of Pahang … lived the natural life and never had a reason to visit the clinic. My father had kidded her about being afraid and brought his bravado to the rest of us.

A day or two later we went and got our shots with my father complaining all the way home that it was so painful. My mother on the other hand said she hardly felt it. It was a memory that just popped up recently and I didn't resist it … and along the way viewed again the semi-dysfunctional family we had always been … and realized why a lot of people hate to hear family stories.

We were living in a wooden stilt house in the 60's and my father had planted a golden shower tree just outside the wooden steps leading up to the house. It was a favorite for the butterflies to lay their eggs and the emerging caterpillars would slowly chew up all the leaves. Still my father would not allow anyone to kill the caterpillars and in the process taking the opportunity to tell us its another form of life.

Well … miraculously the leaves would sprout back and for the 10 years or so that we lived there the tree managed all right. I remember sitting on the wooden steps as a child and viewing the pupae that the caterpillars turned into until they break out from it and fly away. I don't recall thinking that it was a wondrous phenomenon … I was just surprised … and figured it was the hand of God. In growing older I came to see how we ourselves chew on the leaves of knowledge of the world.

I had broken away from the provincial, make-believe world of children … but in getting away to college and the city I had also dismissed the entire idea of family as make-believe. In coming back to it … it occurs to me that there was nothing wrong with the family affirming me in the make-believe world I lived in. It didn't make me believe it more … but when growing up meant a breakdown in make-believe … I moved on to re-cultivate the experience while maintaining a distance from the family. It was a bold step and a harrowing experience.

There ought to be a word for that … in fact several words come to mind … such as incoherent, mixed-up, irascible, argumentative and a social invalid. It brought me in … into the mysterious world of the heart and mind … as if I was in a pupae myself … before releasing me to fly again with my thoughts and ideals. Fortunately being a social invalid is not a criminal offence otherwise I would have been in jail.

Which brings me to the issue of social justice. A man who adheres to social laws finds that the law takes its course after the crime is done. There is recourse to libel and slander and we can protect ourselves that way. Physical child abuse receives good attention today. The rights of women has come to be handled better. And in recent times, with respect to same sex companionship, where it has had a material contribution in the relations, the law provides for equity.

However it has no guarantees for the influence of an older brother or sister or the bull attack in the field … and the individual is expected to take it on the jaw and move on. Nor does it take into account the faith we had in God that went unfulfilled. The question of ... ' Are we being served in the same way that we perceive ourselves serving others?' … is at the center of the inquiry we make as regards social justice.

The last word on a father must surely take into account the fact that as father he is a part of the system of social justice in which he serves and is served. Justice may return to fulfill our causes in this life or in the next and by that it introduces to us the concept of a life that does not end in this lifetime but continues a little further in the creative order of things. We are thereby requested to refine our understanding of the social juggernaut.

In a argument with my oldest brother on some of the same issues, my father told him, ' wait till you have a family of your own … and you'll know I have been right.' He was right of course. Some years back I went up to a framed picture of him my brother keeps in his house and said I was sorry. Fatherhood is a stunt no stuntman is ever trained well enough to perform unscathed … but they obviously work with a golden shower tree and butterflies.