"Not Fair."

I- like the rest of the nation- struggle to accept a verdict that just shouldn't be. Every time I see Caylee Anthony's picture, I can see Ella's face instead- her big, inquisitive, brown eyes and mischievous grin. I begin to feel my blood boil, my stomach turn, the tears begin spilling over. I'm reminded of the occasional times I would catch my mom staring at the tv screen with tear-stained cheeks as yet another story unfolded of neglect or abuse. Of course, I could understand why it upset her, but it never fully resonated with me until now. When I became a mommy, suddenly, every story on the news became extremely personal. How could he leave his kid in a hot car in the middle of August? What possessed her to drive her car into the river and drown her kids? How could someone leave a 12-hour old baby in a dumpster? How? Why?? And so I will never again watch the news without thinking, "that could be Ella...what if that was Milo?" Unfortunately, at times like this, we come face to face with the sobering reality that we don't choose the families we're born into. And so on the one hand, I'm reminded how eternally grateful I am for the my own upbringing. My own sense of purpose is re-defined in the life and legacy I'm creating for my own children. But on the other hand, I struggle to come to terms with this word, "fair."

We hear it over and over again, don't we? "Well, sometimes, life's just not fair." Just the other day, I said those very words to Ella as she crumpled to the kitchen floor in a sobbing heap when I wouldn't let her have more goldfish. And there it was again- one of the first thoughts that crossed my mind when the verdict was read last night. "Not fair" is a sore understatement in a circumstance like this. So are we simply placating each other because we just have nothing better or more productive to say? Interestingly enough, studies conducted at UCLA in 2008 indicated that reactions to fairness are "wired" into the brain and that, "Fairness is activating the same part of the brain that responds to food in rats... This is consistent with the notion that being treated fairly satisfies a basic need." [1] Unfortunately, issues of "fairness" are everywhere we turn. It's not fair that some children slowly starve to death while I wash down three-quarters of Ella's leftover pasta and veggies every night that she won't touch. It's not fair that babies are born with HIV because their mommies have HIV because there's an epedimic and there's really no other alternative to life. It's not fair that the choices an adult or parent makes can forever influence the rest of their children's {sometimes short-lived} lives. It's not fair that cancer chooses to strike whoever it pleases without any consideration to age, family or prior health condition.

But I think the looming question underlying the issue of "fairness" is, "where's the justice?" How do we right the wrong? As soon as our children develop the cognitive ability to understand the concept of right and wrong, we begin the process of discipline and setting boundaries and we explain to them that there are consequences for wandering outside of those boundaries. Often, the worse the choice is, the worse the punishment is. And in the case of a murdered 2 year old- when something is this wrong, there is a burning indignation. Outrage. Shock. Maybe we even feel a sense of personal responsibility. We feel we shouldn't have it this good when others don't. I think deep down inside all of us, there is the innate desire go to sleep at night knowing the villain is behind bars, or the cure for cancer has been found, or that children won't go to sleep hungry. The American philosopher John Rawls says this: "Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought."

And today, I- like the rest of the nation- fight against the growing paranoia that our institution has let us down, and that justice has not, in fact, been served. Again. So it seems, we will continue to go to bed each night with diminishing hopes for reconciliation of the warring parts of our government and ourselves. We wait for rectification. And we are reminded to hold even tighter to all the good things we have, because sometimes, that's really all we can do.