JUDGES

Judges and lawyers have more power than anyone else in America. All of America voted in 2000 but a few judges determined the outcome. Millions of people voted for and against Prop. 8 but one person determined the outcome.

Hundreds of people send their poetry books to a contest, and a judge chooses one of them.

When we watch American Idol, we watch the Judges choose a winner.

It's strange that now when so many question judgment, and the ability to judge, and say, Don't Judge, that so many crucial things are decided by judges.

More and more the left has decided that everything is relative, and there is no God, and there is no final authority. So they've realized that if they control the judges, their viewpoint will prevail. This probably started with bussing. At least that's the first time it affected me personally. I was in a good school but was bussed an hour away into a minority school district where I was afraid to go to the bathroom for fear of getting stabbed. Some kid I knew had apparently had this happen to him. At least that was the story. I was only 10, so I don't know if it's true. But it was what we heard. I had no idea why I had to say goodbye to all my friends at the good school with the good teachers. Some judge decided that bussing was good, and the whole nation was rerouted out of its neighborhoods to promote peace and brotherly love. My family moved to a small town to escape bussing. But first I endured two lost years when my only concern was to keep from getting gang-banged in the hallways between classes.

The right keeps arguing against judicial activism, because the right believes in God and the People as the sources of authority. The left has correctly perceived that everything is a matter of who's at the switch. The judges are at the switch.

We have had aristocracies and meritocracies and kleptocracies and monarchies, and there is probably a word that means rule by a Judge, or rule by Judges, but I don't know it, and am too lazy to look it up. Whatever it is, that's where we're going. In a sense, it's back to Rome itself, when Nero was judge and jury even if he left the execution to someone else (until it came to himself, in which case he committed suicide). Is it true that as we leave behind the ability to judge, and no longer believe it's possible to do it fairly, that we in turn have turned to judges, to get them to give our agenda a green light?

Just as we no longer believe in a higher Law, or in universals, we now have judges who arbitrarily decide yeah or nay, up or down. Even Obamacare has been thrown out by a judge. Hundreds of thousands of man hours go into a law, and then a judge puts his thumb up or down. I like it when it goes my way, and don't like it when it doesn't, but I wonder why anyone bothers to do all the grunt work if at the end the judge will decide without reference to any truth rather than what he or she wanted all along.

What I don't quite understand is how this has developed. When someone judges, it's not the final say, but it's so expensive to grant a retrial. There are courts of appeal. There are circles of judgement. At each level, newspapers weigh in. Television stations weigh in. Some judges are in for life, like in the Supreme Court. Some are appointed, and some are voted in. Unlike the House and the Senate, which I largely understand, I don't understand all the different courts. Towns, counties, states, cities, have courts. There are also military courts, and federal and national courts. There is a civil court and I think the other kind has another name. I don't know what an appelate court is, and I don't understand the judicial regions of the country. There are about ten of them I think. Do all of them have their own prison systems?

I've never been on trial, and have never had any friend of mine who ended up in prison. I knew someone once who knew someone who was a guard at a small prison. I like prisons and I like the police, but I don't know any criminals who have done time.

I do know that everybody always has everybody else on trial. We judge one another by dress, by how well they follow the Ten Commandments, or how cool they look. We judge by how much money a person has, and by how friendly he or she is, or whether or not they can use decent grammar. We judge everybody. Jesus said not to judge, and yet he himself judged everybody he came in contact with (sometimes he found something of merit in people that no one else would consider meritorious). He was brilliant at this his whole life, surprising everyone with his weird judgements, and his strange way of turning everything upside down. Pilate judged him, but Pilate ended up as the bad guy, and his wife said, we're goners in perpetuity thanks to your judgement, Pilate. We'll be railroaded to hell by God Almighty. Nice going.

Judgement seems to rush toward absolute relativism on the one hand and absolute universalism on the other hand. Is there finally a higher law? Without justice, no society can possibly survive. With judges pulling judgements seemingly out of their asses, it's hard to understand how the rest of us are supposed to take law seriously.

We seem to want it both ways. We are each our own personal Nero. But no one has as much power as Nero, except a judge. It seems arbitary who gets to be a judge, and their judgement appears to be arbitrary and merely personal, rather than universal.

One of the reasons I find God so appealing is that I want an omniscient God who will judge each one of us. I find this makes sense of the world, and that nothing else does.