Cheating justice

Milosevic is dead.

Not a huge surprise. We all die, the good, the bad, the unsung and the famous.

What troubles me is the media reaction, interviewing people angry that he died and "cheated justice".

Justice isn't revenge. Anyone who thinks that way has no business in the judiciary, in politics, really anyplace except the front row of the religious edifice of their choice, trying to learn a few things about how the world should work.

We can't surrender to anger, to hatred. To say a man who lived out his last months in jail and died there has avoided justice because we didn't get to see him twitch at the end of a rope or strapped on a gurney is perverse, pandering and unacceptable. I can't see Jesus, or Buddha or any significant religious figure or social philospher of the last 10,000 years of human history backing that lowest-common-denominator wretched plea for blood.

What breeds the Milosevics, the Hitlers, the Bin Ladens, is our inability, as a species, as a polyglot of societies, to rise above our anger, our rage, our thirst for a retributive scale bathed in blood. Name calling and twisting words like "justice" into personal vendetta is counter-productive and wasteful.

Live your lives for something more than reaction to the evil of others. Choose, not evil for evil, which you then label "justice", but good. Don't listen to talking heads paid big bucks by detached corporate fund shufflers when they try to tell you what you know, in your soul, is wrong.

I'm not saying someone like Milosevic deserves better.

I'm saying that we do.

Shame on the media, and I feel sorry for those so twisted by their own pain they can't break out of it, can't evolve to something more sacred, more human, more just. That there are those who would sensationalize their pain to sell toothpaste is an injustice.