“Silence is violence” is increasingly a justification to meet said violence in kind. Unfortunately, the reciprocated violence tends not to be of the silent variety.
I really like the discussion of the judicial system and the constant need to try to improve it, based on past errors, failures, biases and sometimes just inefficiencies. When I first campaigned for judge over 30 years ago, part of my stump speech was that we only ever have justice with a small j. When we heard about love, hope, charity, peace, or even justice, at our parents knee, we probably had some notion of those things with capital letters, like they were perfect/ absolutes. But working in the trenches as a lawyer and then a judge, it was clear to me that there were various qualities of justice from courtroom to courtroom, but none were perfect. But the best were in courtrooms where the judge really cared about the people in front of her and worked hard to understand the facts and to properly apply the law, and then issue clear, understandable decisions. I would tell a campaign audience that it is men and women just like me and you who serve as judges and lawyers, witnesses, bailiffs, court clerks, court reporters, jurors and police officers, and none of us are perfect and so our work product would never be perfect either. Nevertheless, that we each had the potential to do our jobs well, and if we each did our allotted task well, we could be proud of the quality of justice that resulted. I vowed to work hard and to treat people with respect and do the job as well as I possibly could, even if imperfectly. I was elected in a 5 way race and was reelected 3 more times after that without any opposition, serving 24 years.
Humanizing the people who constitute our institutions helps demonstrate that getting angry at institutional abstractions probably isn't the way to go. "The criminal justice system" or "the government" or "corporations" or even "America" have no existence independent of the people who make them up. Those people are all of us. When we rage against our institutions we're raging against ourselves, and our friend and neighbors. How we can help individuals be more effective in their work is a much more tractable problem than how we can fix our institutions, even though, by and large, they're the same problem.
I really like the discussion of the judicial system and the constant need to try to improve it, based on past errors, failures, biases and sometimes just inefficiencies. When I first campaigned for judge over 30 years ago, part of my stump speech was that we only ever have justice with a small j. When we heard about love, hope, charity, peace, or even justice, at our parents knee, we probably had some notion of those things with capital letters, like they were perfect/ absolutes. But working in the trenches as a lawyer and then a judge, it was clear to me that there were various qualities of justice from courtroom to courtroom, but none were perfect. But the best were in courtrooms where the judge really cared about the people in front of her and worked hard to understand the facts and to properly apply the law, and then issue clear, understandable decisions. I would tell a campaign audience that it is men and women just like me and you who serve as judges and lawyers, witnesses, bailiffs, court clerks, court reporters, jurors and police officers, and none of us are perfect and so our work product would never be perfect either. Nevertheless, that we each had the potential to do our jobs well, and if we each did our allotted task well, we could be proud of the quality of justice that resulted. I vowed to work hard and to treat people with respect and do the job as well as I possibly could, even if imperfectly. I was elected in a 5 way race and was reelected 3 more times after that without any opposition, serving 24 years.
I love that.
Humanizing the people who constitute our institutions helps demonstrate that getting angry at institutional abstractions probably isn't the way to go. "The criminal justice system" or "the government" or "corporations" or even "America" have no existence independent of the people who make them up. Those people are all of us. When we rage against our institutions we're raging against ourselves, and our friend and neighbors. How we can help individuals be more effective in their work is a much more tractable problem than how we can fix our institutions, even though, by and large, they're the same problem.
For just a little sense of what Matthew Syed has to say, Since I have not and may not ever read the Black Box book, I found this video https://www.leadingauthorities.com/speakers/video/matthew-syed-black-box-thinking