Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times

by Soong-Chan Rah

With this high level of abstraction, it is easy to scapegoat individuals and move responsibility to the other rather than admit personal responsibility. When a mass shooting of children at a school occurs, we will claim that this horrible action is the result of just one crazed gunman rather than consider the possibility of a socialstructure problem at work. Some will argue that it does no good to consider social action when clearly this action can be blamed in its totality on just one individual. But we do not consider that doing nothing to prevent future tragedies in the face of a national tragedy demonstrates the sin of omission. We practice this same abstract thinking in our relation with the rest of the world. We write checks to end human trafficking but lack concern for how our demand for cheap, disposable clothing generates a larger system of exploitation. We forget that hunger in Africa has any connection to the history of Western colonialism from which we in the West have significantly benefited. We are oblivious to the need for corporate responsibility to address colonial abuses in the previous centuries. We are able to abstract our justice efforts from the material reality of the history of injustice in the relationship between the Western colonizers and the colonized who still suffer the ill effects of a colonial history. We abstract injustice, allowing ourselves to believe we no longer have a direct hand in it. We make injustice impersonal; if everyone is resp...