The Heart of the Issue

Whether it’s children starving in sub Saharan Africa, girls being sold as slaves in Thailand, teenagers fighting in Uganda’s civil war, or even the homeless and unemployed here in the United States, our generation concerns itself with introducing social justice into situations lacking it. We don’t accept bitter tears or sickening malfeasance. We don’t tolerate the intolerable. Instead, we defend the defenseless.

We are a generation that sees injustice and fights it at every angle – through enthusiastic Facebook events and ambitious fundraising campaigns. Rallying our friends and encouraging our coworkers, we have made it our business to face situations of grief and pain with the money, education, and direct action that is needed to blot out instances of suffering. In contrast to our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, our expectations go beyond the government. Though our nation’s foreign aid and domestic programs make a dent in the problems of the world, that does not relieve us of our responsibility. On our shoulders we feel the pressure of every societal problem that we encounter and our collective conscience does not let us turn our eyes away from them. We expect action if not from others, from ourselves.

That expectation of action transcribes itself into reality. We act. We organize. We do everything to make a difference. Resources are diverted and passion is recruited. Soon, an army of nonprofits assaults the issue and individuals take up arms against its evils.

After such effort, sometimes we experience the heartening achievement of success. Some of these human travesties begin to shrink or disappear. This victory achieved, the next gaping need rises to plead for our assistance. Without a break in our step, we find ourselves rallying our peers to fight another unacceptable injustice.
Just as often, though, our painstaking efforts result in no visible change. Perhaps after years of ceaseless campaigning there are still tears being shed by numberless victims of unspeakable brutality. In moments of solitude and discouragement we look at this stagnancy and wonder what the use was – what we could possibly do against evil that knows neither boundaries nor repose.

There is a frequently missed step in this process. It has nothing to do with how to get the word out and it isn’t a critique of the way we choose which issue to fight for. Instead it has to do with the way we approach the concept of social justice. Perhaps there is a crucial philosophical foundation to this fight that we omit to acknowledge.

Take a step back and look at the state of the world. From Japan to Johannesburg and New York to New Delhi, this planet is inundated with examples of incredible pain and incomprehensible cruelty. These tragic situations aren’t exceptions – this corruption in humanity exposes itself in every culture, people group, and community. A cursory survey of the state of society in any country reveals that there is something fundamentally wrong with us. For some reason people feel compelled to hurt, enslave, and kill. Heedless of educational, financial, or social status, injustice flourishes to some extent in every human environment.

Results like these beg questions of origin. If human nature is essentially good, what explains this widespread corruption? Could there possibly be some sort of universal problem with humanity? Some sort of international, trans-generational, non-discriminating issue that has its roots in our most fundamental identity?

I realize it is highly unpopular in our modern, progressive world to talk in a way that contradicts the idea that every culture can decide right and wrong for itself, but the facts speak for themselves. It may be polite to endorse moral relativism, but the question remains – the question of evil and its presence in humanity. It may be tempting to let the blame fall on society’s structure, but we have to stop faulting circumstance and start recognizing that changes in environment won’t cure what we have.

By conducting a thorough exploration of what is wrong with mankind, we can gain a new perspective. Instead of viewing those starving children in Africa and the persecuted faithful in China as separate and unfortunately coincidental issues, we can recognize those two situations as symptoms of the same disease. After finding this connection, the world’s plague of countless injustices stops looking like a sea of unrelated issues and starts looking like the interconnected theaters of a larger war against this darker side of us.

Our new perspective also transforms the idea of basing success or failure on an issue-by-issue basis. A macro view of the problem reveals that whether we are lobbying for human trafficking awareness or going to Uganda to save child soldiers, we are all in the same fight. If one specific attempt fails but the global march against injustice continues, success has been accomplished.

The battle for social justice in the world is not a battle only for the promotion of certain results, but it is another facet of a conflict that has existed for millennia and continues to plague us. When we can take the time to explore just what it is that causes the world’s pain, we can approach more universal and timeless solutions. After all, how is someone supposed to stop outbreaks of a disease without first understanding how to eliminate, or at least explain, the root cause?

I do not doubt the effectiveness of those individuals and organizations that oppose the evil in the world – I praise their efforts. Instead, I want to urge you, reader, to take a hard look at the fundamental problems that we face. Grapple with them and use the answers you find to bring the fight against global injustice to an entirely different level. We are a generation of justice – we can either take that to be a call to fight skirmishes against independent scenarios of injustice or we can take it as a call to operate off of a new and powerful perception of humanity as a whole.