I gave a platform at the Baltimore Ethical Society this past Sunday on social justice. I was intrigued how it brought up childhood memories of injustice.  Despite my relatively comfortable childhood, most of my memories were about injustice done to me! (Maybe this is not so unusual given adolescent tendencies towards solipsism – Q: How many teenagers does it take to screw in a light bulb. A: One.  They hold the bulb and the world revolves around them.)

It was at Martin Luther King Jr. School in Berkeley, California, that I most poignantly remember feeling that I was the victim of injustice. My father’s 1969 academic sabbatical pulled me away from my comfortable East Coast private school and threw me into a labyrinth of corridors of this tough, large public junior high.  I must have looked like a victim, as I attracted bullies like a porch light attracts moths.  The typical shakedown began, “Got any money?”  Answering, I thought sensibly, “No,” I fell into the trap.  The bully would counter, “If I find any on you can I keep it?”   Things went downhill from there.

Embarrassed by my own inability to avoid such confrontations, I put up with taunts and punches.  One day, I dropped some quarters on the locker room floor.  Like a fool, I tried to pick them up – I should have listened to the voice in my head: “just walk away from the money.”  I was pushed against a locker, pummeled, and robbed.
 
Afterwards, sitting on the floor half in tears, what stood out most in the rage that swelled inside me was not the lost quarters or physical pain.  It was the sense of violation that made my ears burn and breath quiver.  The violation whipped up a swirl of emotions: embarrassment, humiliation, fear, anger, indignation, and even a yearning for revenge.  

But the sense of violation was more than emotions; it was not simply that I would have preferred to avoid the beating.  For me, this moment of injustice violated some grander standard of right and wrong. It was as if truth itself was at stake.  Using a simple math metaphor, it was as if the bully was saying, “2+2=5.”  I knew this was not true.  I knew 2+2=4.  The bully was wrong. The violation should not have occurred – and this burned inside me.

Today, as an Ethical Culture Leader, I still hear that cry of adolescent indignation over injustice.  In trying to build social justice, I am trying to give that young boy inside me a voice.  I am trying not to squelch it with excuses and routine.

I was encouraged to begin with my childhood memories after reading the first sentence of The Idea of Justice, written by Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen.  He quotes Pip in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations pointing out that, “In the little world in which children have their existence, there is nothing so finely perceived and finely felt, as injustice."

Pip knows that the world has not treated him fairly.  Orphaned, struggling to improve himself, his sense of injustice is acute. His sense of victimhood fueled growth of a strong conscience.

As I grew up and put my adolescent self-pity into perspective, the suffering of the world became clear.  My sense of violation became universalized, if you will. Maybe unconsciously I approached what Lawrence Kohlberg saw as a higher stage of moral reasoning – a commitment to justice based on abstract reasoning and universal principles.  No longer did it matter so much to me who was the victim, as it did that someone was being violated.  Here was the seed that would grow into the core of my Ethical Culture faith: the conviction that every person was of inherent worth.  

I am curious as to how others remember becoming aware of injustice, and how it has evolved into your current sense of morality.  Are your childhood memories of injustice a part of your ethical perspective?