In a global sense, the hardest part of human existence is finding the balance between yearning for more and accepting what we have. People who simply settle are considered lazy or unambitious. People who constantly yearn for more are considered selfish or too ambitious. Somewhere in the space between there is a place where we should reside.

Donald Trump is never going to jail. Yes, he has 91 charges. Yes, he has committed any number of unspeakable crimes and there is probably another 100 he hasn’t been charged with and we can’t prove. Ken Paxton is never going to jail. Yes, he has been charged with crimes in federal court, but that was nearly a decade ago. The wheels of justice just roll differently for some people. Or don’t.

The Supreme Court recently decided to hear oral arguments on the claim that Donald Trump had absolute immunity to do whatever the hell he wanted as president of the United States. That doesn’t mean they agree mind you. I can’t think of any legal or historical justification for it, but I am only a mere political science major. I’m sure more learned legal and constitutional scholars could weigh in, but the notion that a president can be above the law is ludicrous on its face.

The Trump phenomenon is both fascinating from an academic sense and infuriating from a real life sense. Trump has managed to tap into everyone’s hate, fear, and insecurities all the while being the embodiment of that hate, fear, and insecurity. We have a two-tiered justice system. Everyone knows it and everyone feels frustration by it. How else could we explain someone getting charged 91 times and not going to trial for any of it? Yet, he is allowed to prattle on about it in his speeches and somehow the MAGAs see him as their warrior against it and not the ultimate recipient of it. It’s both fascinating and infuriating at the same time.

If this is normal then we have some serious problems. The truth of the matter is that it hasn’t been normal up until this point. Even if we take the Supreme Court and all of the lower courts at their word, they are treating this like it was business as usual. Yes, under normal circumstances we would want to delay criminal proceedings when those proceedings are political in nature. The trouble is that Trump presents a clear and present danger to the welfare of the United States. He clearly ran for president to avoid legal responsibility. It’s transparent. It’s disgusting. It’s incredibly demoralizing to watch it actually work.

Someone smarter than me once said that the universe bends towards justice. I can’t debate that eternal wisdom, but I doubt it every single day. I have no doubt that Trump will someday pay the piper, but it will likely happen in the history books. His children will be left with the bill. I’m sure there is some culpability there, but you have to wonder if that’s justice at all. I suppose in some sense it is and I suppose it is the best we can possibly do. Somewhere between the world we have and the world we want is a world we can strive for. Maybe someday that second tier of people that evade justice can finally reap what they sow. At least we can hope.

Tragedies follow the same formula. Someone gets themselves into an easily avoidable situation and suffers the ultimate demise. Usually the cardinal sin is hubris. Hubris can be defined as “exaggerated pride or self-confidence.” Nearly all of our tragic characters think of themselves as invincible for one reason or another. They are all tragically wrong.

There are any number of days that go by when I lose faith in the universe. The universe can be loosely defined by whatever cosmic force you choose to adhere to. Some traditions call it karma. Others say it is fate. The idea is that eventually everyone gets what is coming to them. That could be positive or negative depending on what we render.

That brings us to our ex-president. He has been found liable in civil court for sexual assault. He has a judgement against him for business fraud even though the total amount is still up in the air. It could be that he will end up owing upwards of 400 million plus in those combined judgments. That can seem like justice, but as we know, those numbers can seem about as real as Monopoly money. You have appeals. You have cries of poor. You have numerous delays and running out of the clock.

E. Jean Carroll might end up fetching a small portion of the money owed to her. After you consider the fees her lawyers will collect you have to wonder if she gets anything other than a symbolic victory. The same will be true for the state of New York. Meanwhile, millions of addle=brained meth heads will send in their five and ten bucks to shield their orange Jesus from feeling the effects of his own stupid crimes.

At each step of the way I have been overwhelmed. I never thought he would be charged with anything. He has found ways to weasel out of these things before. His life has been a life free of responsibility for anything. So, when asked how much jail time he will serve for his 91 counts I still set the over/under at zero with zero being the heavy betting favorite. I don’t know what the excuse will be, but I’ll bet it will be a good one.

The ultimate irony is that none of this needed to happen. He could have continued to live a responsibility free life well into sand trap induced dementia. He could have accepted defeat following 2020 and been a fairly benign figure in history. Most of the 91 counts are directly related to his inability to accept defeat. Some of them are loosely related like the documents case. Sure, the documents aren’t directly related to him refusing defeat but I’m sure he convinced himself they belonged to him because he was still the rightful president.

Even the Stormy Daniels stuff would probably have gone away if he had just walked away. Hubris thy name is Donald. I have no idea if the civil fraud case would have continued, but he probably could have stemmed the tide on all of his civil trials by simply walking away. You got to have a pretty big ego to be president. None of the other presidents have had trouble walking away. He is alone in that regard.

The hope here is that somehow the inability to accept defeat will bring it all crashing down on him. The universe demands it. Our collective sense of judgment demands it. Our own faith in the universe is at stake here. True accountability would be death in prison. Obviously, someone guilty of treason as he most certainly is deserves far worse, but I have to be consistent to my own convictions. I do not believe in the death penalty. So, I’ll take death in prison. Let’s go universe. Let’s get a move on.

There are any number of things missing from modern society. Just listen to conservative commentators long enough and you will hear a long list. There’s the broken homes, there’s the lack of God, and then you get into the really offensive stuff. If we believe them then all of these things are to blame for all of the problems we have today.

So, speaking of shame is certainly ironic. It is ironic because we spend a great deal of time talking about how all of these things are just red herrings and then we land on the shame. Yet, this is different. It is nearly impossible to articulate, but we will give it a try.  Defamation of character is a serious deal. It causes someone to experience shame when they shouldn’t. We certainly feel for Depp if that is the truth, but unfortunately, some people are taking the wrong lesson from all of this. I bet you thought Kyle Rittenhouse went away, but apparently, he has been inspired by Depp. I know you thought he went away. I know you thought his 15 minutes of fame were up. I know you thought he would at least have the presence of mind to keep quiet until everyone had forgotten who this little son of a bitch was. I was right there with you. He apparently never learned anything from that experience.

As complaints go, this is a relatively minor one. After all, three people and their families never got justice for what happened to them. They were gunned down in the street and they were treated like the criminals. Hell, you had the judge in the case refuse to call them victims and then turn around and allow the defense to defame their character in open court.

That judge doesn’t feel shame. He should, but he doesn’t. Obviously, Rittenhouse has been robbed of this experience as well. It definitely impedes his moral development. At the very least, we had hoped that he would realize deep down inside what he had done. We are robbing people of that experience. We have robbed Rittenhouse of that experience.

Shame is the thing that keeps you from seeking the limelight after something like this. Shame is the thing that makes you realize you need to seek forgiveness or some sort penance even if your privaledge somehow exonerates you. Shame is the thing that aids in moral development. It’s the thing that tells you that you’ve done a horrible thing when you’ve killed three people.

Shame is the thing that tells you to go away. It is the thing that is missing all too often. It’s missing in this case because too many people have called this jackass a hero. It’s missing because that’s what he’s internalized and so he doesn’t understand why the mainstream media would say anything different. The best defense against defamation is the truth. The MSM has that in spades. Shame would have told him to leave well enough alone. Sadly, that shame wasn’t there.

The Ahmaud Arbery case clearly shows how good our justice system could be. That’s until you actually pay attention to everything that went into that case. You had someone from law enforcement (though retired) taking the law and throwing it down on its ear.

You had a prosecutor using judgment so outrageous that they ended up being charged with a crime. You had someone filming the whole incident in what could be described as either the height of foolishness, act of real foresight, or strategy gone wrong. You had the trial itself that was anything but smooth. We obviously have high-minded ways of describing this collision of misshapen events, but the kids probably have pegged it best. They call it a “shit show.”

Yet, after all of that malarkey, justice was somehow served. The guilty parties were actually found guilty. While that explanation seems so far out of whack to Arbery’s friends and family, it is far better than the alternative up in Wisconsin. It hardly qualifies as the best of times, but in comparison I guess it will have to do.

In the background somewhere off camera is the debate over critical race theory. On the one hand, one can easily say that justice was served, so why the need to discuss race? Except we can’t avoid looking at how it was served. We can’t avoid looking at why it was served. We can’t avoid the feeling that it would very likely have not been served at all save a little stupid luck along the way. If the footage of the murder had not been captured on camera and sent to the right people it would have never been served.

Sometimes these things are captured for posterity sake and justice still isn’t served. More often than not it isn’t. When we were young, our elders taught us that character is made up of the things we do when no one is watching. Maybe we take the extra cookie or slack off at work when the supervisor is out. That’s small potatoes. If we pervert justice because we can, then do we really need a high-minded academic theory to tell us we’ve done it? Is it really that difficult to imagine it happening more often?

Most people are smart enough to take only one extra cookie from the cookie jar. They don’t raid the whole thing because that would be too obvious. Justice isn’t grotesquely biased on most occasions. That would be too obvious. We eat around at the corners until the advantage is clear. We do it so that we have plausible deniability. So yes, justice was served. It was only served because the whole world was watching. Still, there are times when even that is not enough.

We’ve talked about this before. We’ve talked about it all before. We are struggling to combat people that have no sense of shame. Doing so can be unsettling and confusing for those of us that operate in a world that has shame. Shame limits us and so there are suggestions that we shut off that portion of our mind that allows us to feel it. We fight fire with fire and guns with more guns. That’s not the answer in my opinion.

The gerrymandering of districts was originally designed to just provide one part with an advantage over the other, but it has done so much more and probably more than the architects of it originally intended. Those that study the competitiveness of House races have noticed something over time. Well under half are decided by ten points or less either way. Since the Supreme Court neutered the Voting Rights Act, the gap has been widening.

Of course, the Supreme Court is just one example of how gerrymandering has reared its ugly head. The Republicans have won exactly won election by majority since 1988. Yet, there is a 6-3 court on the conservative side and prominent Republicans are trying to convince us the country is center-right. What exactly is the evidence of that?

The damage is two-fold. Sure, we could look at this narrowly and say there are more Republicans in government than the demographics suggest there should be. Yet, that’s a small way to look at it. The secret lies in the non-competitive nature of those districts. Well over 300 of the 435 districts are currently non-competitive. If I don’t have to convince a majority to vote for me then I don’t have to be reasonable. I don’t have to compromise. In fact, the more extreme I can be the better.

If you want to fix what ails us you fix our democracy. Simply put, Congress needs to reflect the values of the people. If you look at individual planks of the legislation that passes the House (but not the Senate) then you’ll see that even a majority of people that consider themselves Republican consider them to be good ideas. So, it isn’t about Republicans vs. Democrats or any kind of a shift in the values that people actually have. Most people believe in fairness. Most people believe in compassion. Most people believe in human decency. We just have a system that rewards people that don’t believe in those things.

Those people then get to appoint our judges. Those judges then become the arbiters of justice. Sure, we notice huge trials like the Rittenhouse trial, but the key are the smaller ones no one pays attention to on a daily basis. They are the ones that incarcerate hundreds of thousands of people on drug charges or fail to protect women from would be predators. When heads repeatedly becomes tails it can catch up with you. When up is repeatedly force fed to us as down it takes its toll. People of a lesser mind come to believe justice is actually being served. People of a greater mind see the injustice and become either angry or apathetic. Neither serves us well.

We know how to fix it, but the question is whether we have the will to do it. We simply take the drawing of districts out of human hands. Studies have shown that computers can draw districts that can flip the switch. Instead of over 300 non-competitive districts we would have over 300 competitive ones. Politicians that just throw stink bombs into the process would be drummed out. I imagine some would adapt and some wouldn’t. What would remain would be a body politic that would reflect the real values of those that vote for them. Then come the judges and everyone else on down. It won’t happen overnight, but we didn’t get here overnight either. It just seems like we did.

As I write this it should be noted that the verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case has not been reported. By the time you read this, it likely has already come down. I’m notoriously not a gambling man, but if I were I’d lay down heavy odds that he’s walking home. I’m not a soothsayer here, after all, more than me is saying the same thing.

There have long been arguments about self-defense and it’s one of those discussions where I feel I must be taking crazy pills. At this point, I’m not arguing anymore. There really is no point in it. If someone can’t see the plain truth that is right in front of them then they likely never will. Many of these folks are people we used to count as friends. Some of them are family. It hurts to even think about what they are at this point.

Most of the commentators have been dancing around the shame. Where does it go? If you see the truth then you definitely feel it. When you see such a huge miscarriage of justice it’s hard to feel anything else. Our justice system seems capable of slowly making up for egregious errors in justice. Wrongfully convicted folks can appeal. They can challenge issues of law. They can introduce new evidence that wasn’t introduced before. There have been hundreds of folks that have had their guilty verdict set aside.

These aren’t perfect scenarios. There is no getting back the time lost. Yet, one of the miracles of our justice system is the fact that this avenue is available at all. What really isn’t available is the ability to overcome a rogue judge or an odious jury that is willing to put their thumbs on the scales of justice. Victims don’t get a second bite at that apple. They can’t wipe away an ineffective prosecution team or shoddy police investigation. To date, there is very little recourse for their families or those that care about them. They can’t cry foul when they see that the fix is in.

Shame leads to dark places. It can’t go anywhere and there is little we can do about it. It piles on itself and the weight becomes crippling. We can’t look each other in the eye because we know all too well what is going on. We can call it by name, but the unwoke mob will call it cancel culture and try to minimize the shame. They’ll trivialize it. They’ll poke fun at you for it. They’ll hang it like an albatross around your neck.

When someone like Rittenhouse walks away it eats just a little bit more out of our soul. It feeds that depression that so many of us feel. It stacks on top of the other shameful events that we can’t erase or explain away. It just stays there weighing us all down. Maybe those deniers can’t see it. Maybe they can’t hear it. Maybe they don’t know it’s there. They certainly will feel it at some point and by then it will be too late. By then the weight may crush us all.