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Justice & Injustice Justice & Injustice "Power, at its best, is love implementing the demands of justice; justice, at its best, is love correcting everything that stands against love." -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. For as long as space endures and for as long as living beings remain, until then may I too abide to dispel the misery of the world. -The Dali Lama As part of our investigation of Justice and Injustice, we need to examine our own experiences of Justice and Injustice. Pre-writing/Discussion Questions: What have your own encounters with justice and/or injustice been? How have we reacted and acted in these situations? What have we learned from these circumstances? Have we ever acted justly? Unjustly? What do we believe justice and injustice are? What role will justice and injustice play in our lives? Will we fight for justice? Where can we find hope in a world so filled with injustices? Example of Injustice in the world today--- “A Former Child Soldier Tells His Story” by Caitlin A. Johnson. An excerpt of A Long Way Gone." (CBS) To be a boy forced to bear arms in an adult conflict is to be a prisoner of war of a terrible kind. Ishmael Beah, 26, went through that extraordinarily horrific struggle as a child in Sierra Leone. He details his story of survival in the new book, A Long Way Gone. "'We must strive to be like the moon,' an old man in Kabati repeated this sentence often," Ishmael Beah read from his book for the Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith. "I remember asking my grandmother what the old man meant. She said that people complain when there is too much sun. But she said, no one grumbles when the moon shines. The moon was kind of struggling to stay alive even though these clouds were trying to cover it. And you know, our journey was like that, too." A war almost put out the light in Ishmael Beah but he wouldn't let that happen. That is why he has a story to tell. It begins in 1993, in his small, close-knit village. "My life before the war was very simple but very happy," he said. "Very peaceful, beautiful, and the people are incredibly kind and nice. I didn't fear anything. Anything! Nothing at all. A lot, a lot of trust among people; perhaps way more than we should." In other parts of his country a civil war was raging and spreading. Still, it seemed far away to the young Ishmael who was most interested in American hip-hop. "Our community and my father, they would be like, 'What is going on with these kids,' you know? Cause we started dressing like that," he said. "You know sometimes we would talk to each other like, 'Yo, peace out, son. I'm out.' And people would be like, 'What? Like, are you serious?'" When he was just 12 years old he and his friends left home to perform in a talent contest in a town just miles away. When he and his friends were just 16 miles from home, they found out their village was attacked. He witnessed horrific images. "We saw men carrying their dead children in their arms. I saw a man cry for the first time in my life, so this really disturbed me quite a bit.” So Ishmael and his friends wandered from village to village scrounging for food and water. And after a year he finally found out that his family was in the next village. But when he went to find them, he encountered more violence. "We started hearing gunshots," Ishmael said. "Pow-pow-pow-pow-pow-pow. And then we started seeing smoke and I knew that my family had been burned and everything. The pain of knowing what had just happened was so severe that I wished I'd actually been in the village to die with them." No longer was there reason to run."My friends were actually dragging me along because I'd lost hope," he said. Sierra Leone's civil war started in 1991 with a military coup. As the war escalated, differentiating between the good guys and the bad guys was difficult. Ishmael came upon a village that was being protected the good guys: Government soldiers. There was food, soccer games, places to sleep. It seemed like a happy place, Ishmael said. But the happiness didn't last long. The army needed soldiers and the recruitment was brutally simple. "One day they just said, you know if you're in this village, you're gonna have to fight, otherwise you can leave," he said. "That may seem like a choice to someone who doesn't know the situation. Some people tried to leave, but they were shot." Ishmael and his band of brothers were nothing but boys. Their tools for survival were guns and narcotics. They would take cocaine, marijuana and sometimes cocaine mixed with gun powder, known as brown brown. The kids would watch "Rambo," then head to the killing fields. "I was descending into this hell so quickly and I just started shooting and that's what I did for over two years basically," Ishmael said. Kill or be killed was the lesson young Ishmael learned. The moonlight — his light — was growing dim. "The soldiers became like a surrogate family in a weird way," he said. The bond between Ishmael and his commander may have helped save his life when U.N. workers appeared at the compound. Their mission was to rescue children forced into warfare. "The lieutenant went around and selected a few of us and said: 'This man will take you and give you another life,'" Ishmael said. "And they took our weapons from us and we actually felt that we were being pulled from family again." Ishmael and other child soldiers were brought to the safety of a rehabilitation center in the capital, Freetown. First there was detoxification to remove the drugs, and then deprogramming. "Once the drugs wore out, then the memories started kicking in so quickly, you know, what you had been pressed to do was actually so bad. But the people at the center were really absolutely kind to us." The layers of war and violence slowly shed. Ishmael's light had not been extinguished. And nearly a year later, Ishmael was selected to speak at the United Nations on behalf of the thousands of child soldiers all over the world. "So here I was on a plane," he said. "I'd never been on a plane before. And then we get off the plane and there's this little things falling. So then I'm like, well, I've seen this film about Christmas before with this 'snow.' Maybe it's Christmas here all the time, you know? " Part of the shock was he was dressed in summer-weight clothing and that caught the eye of New Yorker Laura Simms, who was working at the U.N. conference. On impulse, she gave him her coat. And her dedication to Ishmael continued after the conference ended and he was returned to Sierra Leone, where civil war was still raging. “I thought, my God, 'What if I had been in the Holocaust 60 years before and somebody had flown me out to speak in New York with a group of kids, put me in a hotel with three meals a day, and then flew me back?" she said. Simms decided to get Ishmael out of Sierra Leone and adopt the 16-year-old. College followed and now, his best-selling book and newfound acclaim. "I have no idea why I survived," Ishmael said. "It was either pure luck or God was looking out for me. I was so happy as a kid; I had joy inside me that didn't completely get wiped out even through the madness," he said. Somehow, the child inside the man did not die. "Whenever I get a chance to observe the moon now," he read from his book, "I still see those same images I saw when I was six and it pleases me to know that that part of my childhood is still embedded in me." Follow-up Discussion Questions: Where is Sierra Leone? What is a military coup? What did the old man mean by the phrase "'We must strive to be like the moon...” How old was Ishmael at the time this event began? What grade should he be in? What were the boys “tools for survival”? How did they use them? What was the lesson young Ishmael learned? Why did Ishmael say he survived? What happened when he came to the United States? What was the result of his visit? .
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