The ravaged heart of Lady Justice
The wind that whispers through the heartland of America has a memory.
If you find a quiet place, and wait a few moments, there are wondrous stories, legacies and aspirations, carried on that swirling breath just waiting to be remembered.
Riding on those breezes as they roam through our noble forests, dancing wheat fields, iconic mountains and stately canyons, are cherished memories, dreams long since forgotten and sleeping prayers just waiting to be awakened.
Maybe we need to remember that inside those gusty swirls are the echoes of our past racing toward the future notion of who we are as a nation and what we were meant to be.
I don’t doubt that each one of us eagerly desires to hear and understand the wind; however we who are mere mortals are not always wise enough to interpret what we hear. Fortunately, for as long as anyone can remember, there was a figure we believed could both hear, and in time, interpret for us what the wind had to offer.
Americans revered this figure for well over two centuries because we knew that she loved, understood and embraced the wind with a passion.
Though she was blindfolded, she proudly stood her ground, held a set of scales in her right hand and a two-edged sword in her left, but more importantly she held a place in our hearts, and we called her Lady Justice.
We have always loved her sister Lady Liberty because she gave birth to our nation. But we have loved Lady Justice because through her integrity she infused a soul into our national essence and bore our posterity through the birth of her three children known as our Constitution, our Character and our Conscience.
In the distant past, foreign winds of tyranny blew against our shores, but she stood strong, protecting our young nation.
We survived and formed a way of life that would become the envy of every country on the planet. As a rising tempest formed in the southland, it brought a turbulence that could have irreparably divided our nation as we sought to define the balance between state and federal powers, but Lady Justice never flinched.
She heard what was in the wind and rendered the wisdom that she and she alone possesses. Through foreign conflict, internal strife, social unrest, poverty and injustice, our matriarch of virtue has always stood immutable.
But in recent months it appears that Lady Justice has grown weary, weathered and emaciated, as if infected by an untreated respiratory virus. One can only wonder if the gentle breeze that blows through the American heartland drifted through The Windy City and into the hallways of Washington acquiring septicity that Lady Justice inhaled leaving her weakened and less vigilant. Far too many in our nation’s capital have become unwilling to listen to her voice, seek her counsel or trust her integrity. It doesn’t take a physician’s diagnosis to observe that she daily grows weaker from neglect and hypocrisy.
The stalwart Lady Justice isn’t standing at the moment; she is doubled over in agony, posed on one knee, her lungs filled with a toxic miasma, and she is gasping! Her flowing garment is torn. The scales are in her hand, but that hand is firmly planted on the floor as she labors to hold herself up. The two-edged sword once boldly gripped in her right hand is now resting on the floor as if it were too heavy to be proudly elevated any longer.
And the blindfold representing her impartiality no longer covers her eyes. It would seem as though the rogues in Washington boldly stripped off her blindfold and demanded she look the other way while they ravaged her heart and plundered our national essence.
No, I don’t believe that our symbol of sanctity is destined to crumble while her remains are slowly weather beaten and her dust eventually whisked away by the wind. She is waiting to inhale the noble breath of integrity that would restore her to her former glory. May we never forget that Lady Justice has never lived for herself; she lives for her three children and for the nation she loves and serves.
Larry Douglas is a resident of Waynesburg.