Ma'am;... With all due respect, which is the simple respect every citizen should hold for citizen, you do not know what justice is, and that explains why you have stood so often with those who would deny justice... Yes; The United States is an unjust place, and that is what accounts for our great inequality of wealth and our great inequality of political power... When some one like Margaret Thatcher could say that when law ends tyranny begins, it is clear that she confuses law, which is easily manipulated to support power and wealth, -with justice... It is not... It is as possible to have tyranny with law as without. The tyranny with law is more difficult to be rid of... Abelard said: Ius (justice) is the Genus, and Lex (law) is a species of justice... If your laws are not just they are not law, but only a form of tyranny... And that is what the religious right offers to America: Unjust laws protecting a very unjust view of Justice... But societies, which is to say, communities, are founded, formed to protect rights... The rights for which this country was formed and fought for were clear: Life, liberty, and the pusuit of happiness. IN what sense are these goals of Life, Liberty, and happiness- Possible, if we deny justice??? You know that no one can have life, let alone happiness, without justice... The killer takes justice from his victim along with his life... The state in turn denies rights to the killer until he has only the right to die in some way not cruel or unusual.... But what is justice??? Justice is a moral concept like many we deal in, having no tangible characteristic as physical concepts do... We cannot measure or weigh or color a moral concept, and yet we must agree that we have them in common. And we have them in common, these intangible concept like justice, and liberty and equality and love because we find them essential to our lives and well being... Again, if you deny a person justice you deny their life, their right to the essentials of life and so on, until he, or she dies... problem over, for people like you, who seem to wish all those who disagree with you would drop dead... Bad for them... Good for you; but really bad for all... Because as Lincoln pointed out, the standard which makes one the slave of another because he is black may as well make one a slave because he is tan... Societies, as all communites, as forms of relationship built to defend rights should be in the business of delivering social justice. ..Who cares that Justice cannot be defined in gross, or in general??? Justice will always be particular to the relationship, just as love is... When we have a conflict; justice is the coin we fight over... It is the same coin for each of us, which we can only have individually by sharing with each other... What is justice for me in a given situation will be justice for you, determined by both of us, and equally ours. We need a discussion of social justice in this land, and in addition, we need people to learn how to argue, and how to bargain, and there are many books on the subject which would be a wonderful investment of government money...We have to remember, what you seem to have long ago forgotten, that forms of relationship are not just forms....It is not just the law, or only the government... There are the relationships within, and those relationships are always fluid and dynamic, and always involve a lot of give and take so long as they live... You seem to like the skeleton, the form, the structure of society... I like the flesh... We need structure, but the structure alone is death... Thanks.... Sweeney

Where to begin? Let's start with that poorly worded "The Social Justice High School in Chicago, for example, has a 100 percent Hispanic or black student body." Is it a school where all the students are either Hispanic or black? Or is it a school where all the students are Hispanic, or all the students are black, but you don't know which? It sounds like the latter, even though it's probably the former. And it suggests you don't really care what the student body is, because it's full of "them". You know, those darker kids. But more to the point: what's wrong with teaching kids that yes, America has made some big, big mistakes in the past, along with having done a lot of things right? The fact that our country provides enormous opportunities doesn't mean we don't have some serious social problems, and those problems are not entirely self-inflicted by the affected groups. What disturbs me most is that you apparently object to having children who have never faced discrimination (on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, or whatever) learning what life is like for those who do face that discrimination. It's a huge leap from having them learn the facts of life for the underprivileged to assuming that they'll be taught redistribution of goods--about as big a leap as when Leander Perez told New Orleans parents that integrating the city's schools would mean white girls being raped by "burrheads" and "Congolese".