I have watched my kids (often my best teachers) from a young age. I have seen their outrage at unfairness, sometimes on behalf of a friend, others on behalf of someone they don’t know — or even animals. Of course, they have all had their selfish responses as well. But those do not stand as their sole response. It simply illustrates the nature of the cracks that run through our being. We are a damaged creation/image of God, but we remain his creation. And it shows, all the time.

And through my wife and my children, my own cynicism has been softened. The cynic may protect themselves, but at the cost of being open to the voice of God. At least, that is how I discovered it impacted me. It may be pretty risky to extrapolate from my experience to that of anyone else.

Flooding your home is an absurd example. That has no relationship to a concept of ‘fairness’, but rather draws a parallel to some absolute of identical experience. We certainly react with outrage that such a thing could happen at all. And most of us also react to the unfair treatment the poorer residents of New Orleans received. We react against both the unfairness of a damaged creation and the unfairness of our fellow men.

Do we always respond from the resulting sense of justice? No! We’re damaged, remember. Sometimes we do react from greed and selfishness (or even baser attitudes). But the cracks do not and cannot obliterate our created nature.

More than anything else, I smell the … stale remnants of something called “total depravity” wrapped in a fresh tortilla.

But that could always just be me…

I disagree…we only want ‘fairness’ when we think we deserve something we didn’t get our mitts on. I don’t think we want fairness/equality quite as much when our neighbor gets laid off. I don’t cry for fairness when I get away with speeding and my buddy gets pulled over and slapped with a $150 fine…

Show me the throngs of people who voluntarily flooded their houses in the wake of Katrina for the sake of
fairness. Or those who even proposed it be done….

I think it’s related to our sense of greed more than equality…

But I’m a cynic.

*disclaimer:
(for those that don’t know, some high schoolers actually gave me a pair of HUGE lime green ‘big girl panties’ as a gift, because I kept saying to them ‘put on your big girl panties and get over it..’)

Is this deep desire for a world that is fair, which can also be called equality, justice, or a host of other names really something we want to get over? I once thought I had done so, but discovered I had been lying to myself. Now I tend to it a little more carefully.

Expressed as nothing but a whiny outburst of self-focused angst, the plaintive and drawn out, “It’s not faaaiiiirrr!” is indeed something to be discouraged. But it should be discouraged for its focus on self exclusively rather than its often correct interpretation of unfair treatment.

Sorry. I know that had nothing to do with the tone or direction of this post. It’s just one of those random thoughts that popped into my head.