Showing posts with label justice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label justice. Show all posts

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Social justice?

You know, actually I'm not sure what the term "social justice" is... If anyone has a better definition, please comment. To me, I understand it as a statement to indicate the differences in "justice" in regards to social standing. For example, A rich person who can afford to hire a high power lawyer can often times be found not guilty as opposed to a poor person who must settle for a public appointed attorney. Or a smaller example would be how if you are dressed in an expensive suit, you are treated differently by someone in say dirty jeans and T-shirt.
I also view the term "social justice" as something that relates to class (eg: poor vs rich). So the other day, I was hearing how a barrel of oil is now at it's all time high (last I heard $107 a barrel). Then I've seen how Gas prices have really jumped to reflect this as well. We're up around $3.07 a gallon now for Regular. Then I thought... you know, I've never heard a comparison of a rich person's income to a poor person's income. It struck me as odd, that I'd never heard it before. I wonder why? So I actually did some math to make my point.
Wealth is relative. You never have enough and you always want more. But I was trying to figure out how can rich people relate to poor people (and vice versa) there should be a common factor here.
So here's something to think about. (I don't really have a point here, I'm just putting this idea out there in the hopes that someone thinks about it besides me).
Please don't take offense at my example, I'm picking the numbers mainly because I didn't want to think too hard in doing the math.
Let's say the poor person in my example is making $30,000 a year. (I know, a lot of people make less than that - bear with me).
Gas is now $3.00 per gallon. So some quick math and that means that it's a percentage/ratio of .0001. Now, how does a Rich person experience that price of gas? Using the same percentage, that would be that if the rich person who makes say $100,000 a year, they would be spending $10 per gallon for gas!
Then, I thought, what if the numbers were reversed?
So for a rich person of $100,000.00 they are paying a .00003 percentage of their income on a gallon of gas. So how much would that be for the person making only $30,000? 90 cents!
Again, I'm not sure what my point is here, but this just puts things in perspective here for me - and I hope you too.
Thoughts?

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

maybe there will be justice here?

Following yesterday's post where I linked to a youtube video of a police officer using what appears to be unreasonable force is now on "administrative leave" while they investigate. I hope justice is served here. Don't get me wrong, if skateboarding in that area of the city is outlawed, and you skateboard, then yes you should get a ticket or fine. But from what I saw on the video shows a heavy police officer putting all his weight into pinning these teenagers to the ground (A knee in the lower back, and what looks like a choke hold on a young girl. Then he goes on to threaten them with pepper spray. I hope to hear follow ups to this story.
I'm linking here to the Houston Chronicle (which I think is a pretty far right website.)