Justice and Peace

I find that there is a strange recognition attached to anything related to the year of one's birth. 

So, to take an example at random, when this spring break was warm and I finally sat down (laid down in the hammock) to read it, I noticed that the title printed on my book of selected poems by Seamus Heaney reads 1966-1987. 

The end of art is peace. - "The Harvest Bow"

Or, to take something more timely, the protest chant "No justice, no peace" seems to have arisen in or around the year 1987, when it was popularized by Sonny Carson (wikipedia). 

'No peace for all of you who dare kill our children if they come into your neighborhood...'

I understand my life differently and better in the light of these words and events that immediately precede it. Such recent works and histories as we never quite get around to studying in school, we have to look into for ourselves later. 

Perhaps part of the reason those words, that cadence, have particularly resonated with so many ever since, though, is that they hearken back to the Psalmist's formulation and refashion it profoundly:

Kindness [or 'mercy'] and truth shall meet; justice [or 'righteousness'] and peace shall kiss. Truth shall spring out of the earth, and justice shall look down from heaven - (Ps. 85:11-12)

I just want to lay that alongside some events happening now, preceding another imminent birth in our family:

Update: The Tennessee House voted Thursday to expel Democratic Reps. Justin Pearson of Memphis and Justin Jones of Nashville, the chamber’s two youngest Black members. A resolution to expel Democrat Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, a retired teacher who is white, narrowly failed.

Before Justin Pearson was elected to the Tennessee House, before he gained acclaim for stopping an oil pipeline project planned for his neighborhood, he was a student in Memphis schools who wanted a textbook. 

Pearson, then 15, brought the issue to the Memphis City Schools board. The next day, the books were found sitting in storage. His principal was reprimanded, and district officials demanded that school leaders across the city prove that they had handed out textbooks.

“Justin Pearson may have been without a government textbook for the first 11 weeks of school,” The Commercial Appeal wrote about the Mitchell High sophomore in 2010, “but he has learned one thing about democracies: Embarrassing elected officials in public meetings gets action.” - chalkbeat

Like any second-time-parent-to-be, I've been wondering what it will be like having another kid. Like everyone keeping up with current events, I've been concerned about the impacts of this or that political or technological change: AI upending writing and teaching, and the opposing slogans of the culture wars. I rarely write in any way publicly about anything so personal on the one hand, or so mainstream and current on the other, but I have to propose that in these interesting times we should study well both the words in the streets and in the screens; both the "books in storage" and the books of scripture; for there are important echoes there to mark our lives and the lives of our children.