With liberty and justice for all?

We've read both of Sarah Kendzior's books, The View from Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight. From her web site, we learn:

HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT is a history of the past forty years of American decline and how Trump and his cohort both enabled and benefited from elite criminal impunity. It’s also the story of what it’s like to live day to day in an America dominated by a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government — and what that entrenched corruption means for future generations. If you want to understand where we’re going, you need to know the truth about how we got here....

There is a growing list of alleged crimes attributed to Trump and his family. We have, thanks largely to Trump and the Republican Majority Leader of the US Senate, a growing number of federal judges with a distinctly conservative leaning. Some, we suspect, would raise a great hue and cry about increasing the split in an already deeply divided American public if Trump and his family were to be actively and aggressively prosecuted for each and every allegation. There may be enough truth to that concern that we ask you to join us in a thought experiment. "What would Restorative Justice look like if applied to the Trump family?"

The American Friends Service Committee [AFSC] writes:

Restorative justice is a broad term which encompasses a growing social movement to institutionalize peaceful approaches to harm, problem-solving and violations of legal and human rights. These range from international peacemaking tribunals such as the South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission to innovations within the criminal and juvenile justice systems, schools, social services and communities. Rather than privileging the law, professionals and the state, restorative resolutions engage those who are harmed, wrongdoers and their affected communities in search of solutions that promote repair, reconciliation and the rebuilding of relationships. Restorative justice seeks to build partnerships to reestablish mutual responsibility for constructive responses to wrongdoing within our communities. Restorative approaches seek a balanced approach to the needs of the victim, wrongdoer and community through processes that preserve the safety and dignity of all.

 

what are "constructive responses to wrongdoing within our communities"

Photo by J. Harrington

There's even a local example of AFSC Twin Cities "healing justice work." To be candid, we still lean heavily toward the punitive mode of justice, but also recognize we've been using that model for a long, long time and still have miscreants among us. The recovering planner that we are reminds us that "More of the same never solved a problem." So, here's what we've begun to ponder. Assume, for the sake of the experiment, that many/most/all Americans, and many others have been injured and harmed by the actions (active and passive) the Trump family and accomplices have committed during the past four plus years. How could we, as a country, apply a restorative justice model to those actions and would that lead to a healing of the deep divisions we now have?

Apprenticed to Justice

Kimberly Blaeser

The weight of ashes
from burned-out camps.
Lodges smoulder in fire,
animal hides wither
their mythic images shrinking
pulling in on themselves,
all incinerated
fragments
of breath bone and basket 
rest heavy
sink deep
like wintering frogs.
And no dustbowl wind
can lift
this history
of loss.

Now fertilized by generations—
ashes upon ashes,
this old earth erupts.
Medicine voices rise like mists
white buffalo memories
teeth marks on birch bark 
forgotten forms
tremble into wholeness.

And the grey weathered stumps,
trees and treaties
cut down
trampled for wealth.
Flat Potlatch plateaus
of ghost forests
raked by bears
soften rot inward
until tiny arrows of green
sprout
rise erect
rootfed
from each crumbling center.

Some will never laugh
as easily.
Will hide knives
silver as fish in their boots,
hoard names
as if they could be stolen
as easily as land,
will paper their walls
with maps and broken promises,
scar their flesh
with this badge
heavy as ashes.

And this is a poem
for those
apprenticed
from birth.
In the womb
of your mother nation
heartbeats
sound like drums
drums like thunder
thunder like twelve thousand
walking
then ten thousand
then eight
walking away
from stolen homes
from burned out camps
from relatives fallen
as they walked
then crawled
then fell.

This is the woodpecker sound
of an old retreat.
It becomes an echo.
an accounting
to be reconciled.
This is the sound
of trees falling in the woods
when they are heard,
of red nations falling
when they are remembered.
This is the sound
we hear
when fist meets flesh
when bullets pop against chests
when memories rattle hollow in stomachs.    

And we turn this sound
over and over again
until it becomes
fertile ground
from which we will build
new nations
upon the ashes of our ancestors.
Until it becomes
the rattle of a new revolution
these fingers
drumming on keys.

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