The Difference Between Justice and Revenge

There are several quite disparate aspects to the concept of justice, but there are a few basic ideas at its core that separate it from revenge.

Justice can be defined in terms of its effects. The just response to a crime is an action that will end the conflict at hand, while revenge will only perpetuate it. Therefore, a just punishment has to be severe enough that the wrongdoer will not continue to commit the crime, but lenient enough that the wrongdoer will not feel like they have to take their own revenge in response.

Justice is always the more beneficial option because it prevents further wrongdoing. For example, if Event A occurs that prompts one of the two responses, justice will bring an end to the cycle at Event B, whereas revenge will continue the cycle indefinitely.

Justice...or Revenge?

In his article "Justice Must be Done," President of the Daniel Pearl Foundation and father of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl argues that Steven Spielberg's film "Munich" succumbs to moral relativism in its portrayal of Middle Eastern terrorism and fails to impart the message that killing of the innocent is wrong.

I find this evaluation wrong on several bases. The conflict of the movie is an internal one within the hero as he struggles with the notion of assassinating the Palestinian terrorists responsible for the murders of nine Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. He calls the morality of his actions into question, and by doing so, displays a problem with killing. The fact that Mr. Pearl finds offense with is that the hero is not unequivocally in favor of killing those who have killed.

He goes on to frame the argument this way: Since the hero has this internal battle, the film justifies terrorism. He makes this leap of logic based on the assumption that the only proper resolution of a murder is to have the murderer murdered. He never considers that there are other ways of handling the person; he puts forth that the murder of the innocent is wrong, but the murder of the guilty is the only RIGHT thing. Since the hero is not completely committed to this resolution, he finds no fault with the actions taken by the Palestinians, and therefore tacitly condones it.

In the very next paragraph, Mr. Pearl states that "The killers do not interest me. I would rather seek effective ways of lessening the hatred that took Danny's life." Pursuing the murder of the those who beheaded Danny Pearl (the course of action he implies is right through his evaluation of the film) would certainly NOT lessen that hatred, nor does this view support at all the statement that the killers do not interest him.

I submit that the taking of a human life is wrong, regardless of the circumstances. Everyone possesses the right to life, even if they have disregarded this right in others. The view taken by Mr. Pearl is not one of justice, it is of revenge. Justice, a word which he attempts to monopolize in his article, does not advocate the taking of any life. The view that some lives should be taken, even if it's only those of the most guilty, means that not everyone is entitled to theirs, and this is exactly the view taken by the terrorists whom Mr. Pearl condemns.

The Museum of National Intelligence

If I were to build a museum, I would build one to the history of National Intelligence in the U.S. It would inform a misinformed or uninformed public about the CIA and its predecessors, and it would pique interest in this very crucial subject to today's world. It would illustrate the differences intelligence gathering has made on policy and diplomacy around the world in relation to us.

The museum would be divided into 5 sections, arranged chronologically. First would be an introduction to Intelligence that would give the history of intelligence gathering before the U.S. came into being. Second would give the history of National Intelligence from Revolution to Reconstruction. Next would come the section on the age of America's rise to global power, from 1876 to 1947, when the CIA was founded. The fourth section would detail Intelligence in the Cold War, 1947 to 1991. The final section would be about the present era, and how National Intelligence continues to play a huge role in our lives.

Museum-at-a-Glance: The California ScienCenter

To get to know museums a little better, I visited the Air and Space Exhibit at the California ScienCenter, conveniently located right across Exposition Boulevard from USC.

Right from the start, the visitor is given a sense of awe by the early Boeing 707 parked out front. Walking in through the unimposing entrance, one can catch a glimpse of the exhibits inside, a sort of teaser intended to pique interest. The museum is divided into sections: One for military aircraft, one for satellites, one for manned spacecraft, one for the history of flight, and one devoted to aerodynamics.

The museum offers an informative combination of short videos, diagrams, hands-on demonstrations, scale models, and historical artifacts (the one I found most striking was the actual Gemini 11 capsule displayed on the ground floor). These take the visitor to a distant star or show them how air flows over a wing, or show them how flight has developed over time.

Personally, I have always been fascinated with flight and space exploration, so this is the kind of museum that I wouldn't need much prompting to visit. The museum is good at attracting all sorts of different crowds even without being advertised very heavily; it has points of interest to all age groups and is free, so cost is not a restriction, and operates bilingually. The only drawback to the museum is its size -- if it were bigger, it might take longer than the 90 minutes I took (and I toured at a rather slow pace, I thought) to visit everything and appreciate the details.

A Public Space: University Village

Today I visited USC's University Village, located across Jefferson St. from campus. The Village is modeled on a quaint, old European village, but with thoroughly modern American shops and stores.

A great variety of goods and services are offered, but the Village caters mainly to the stable lower class, not to the derelict homeless, nor to anybody approaching the upper class. There are fifty-four shops in five categories, and many that offer low-cost products.

Consequently, there are a great variety of people that were there. I observed people of all the predominant ethnicities in this part of California. Group structure was also varied: I observed people there alone, as couples, in large, non-family groups, and as families. They were mostly walking around functionally instead of recreationally, although there were a few exceptions.

The Village is designed to be an accessible oasis of cleanliness and relaxation in the middle of a city, and to serve college students. In terms of cleanliness, it far outstrips its surroundings; the only noticeable urbanity about it was the graffiti in the bathroom. The flora are well tended and trash cans and ashtrays are provided plentifully. There are numerous places for people to congregate and socialize. Finally, there are many entrances from four different streets, so accessibility is not a problem.

Public and Exclusive Space

Public space - what is it? Quite simply, it is space open to the general public, without restrictions, and without any sort of price attached to it. Public spaces include parks and roads, neither of which are owned by a person or corporation. Exclusive space, on the other hand, is space into which only certain people may enter, whether it be by affiliation with the space or through some kind of special permission. This may be an office building, a government laboratory, or a house. Naturally, these two types of space often come into conflict with each other because of people's interests or simply because there isn't enough room in the world for enough of both. The trend in recent years has been for exclusive space to win out over public space. Why is this, and should it be reversed?


One of the benefits exclusive space has over public space is that it usually makes someone a profit. In America, a capitalist nation, this is of tantamount importance, and of course quite legal. As corporations expand or individuals accumulate more wealth, they seek to branch out in several ways, one of these being the physical expansion of their domain. It is, perhaps, in our instincts to conquer as much as possible and to show our might to our peers and to the world. Whatever the reason, exclusive space is proliferating.

Public space, just as exclusive space, has its benefits, the most important of these being the sense of community it harbors. People gather in parks and chat with each other, they hold events, and they enjoy the company and the feeling of being outdoors. Public space also plays off of the feeling that ownership of exclusive space gives - it makes a person feel better, somehow, to know that there is a range of places available to them, and they can overlook the fact that it is available to everyone.

Both of these kinds of spaces have their merits, and they should both be considered as more and more land (and, as is just beginning to happen now, outer space) is devoted to one side or the other. Certainly private ownership and public use of spaces can coexist; it is up to those responsible to find the right balance.

The Evolution of an Idea

When I set out to write my paper on college's purpose, I had a vague idea that I felt more in touch with the belief that college should be to broaden one's intellectual perspectives. Over the course of writing the paper, my idea crystallized and was focused from some of the examples I worked with. I looked at my own experience and the experiences of several others, and read the insight of some experts. I also thought logically, and fleshed out this idea with some common sense.

At paper's end, my idea was a bit changed; qualified in some ways. This was good, because specificity in a paper is a good thing. I cited some of the examples I looked at in my paper and these also helped to qualify my point. I also added the "why?" aspect to my paper. Having a thesis that you can defend is one thing, but answering the question of "why?" is just as, if not more, important to the impact that it has on the reader.

The Concrete Disciplines vs. The Arts and how they Relate to College

When Caroline Bird wrote in 1975 that for a majority of people, it was not worth it to go to college, she overlooked one very important contingent of college students: Artists. Music majors, visual and fine arts majors, and various other groups of those students studying the arts at college are indeed in the right place.

To be successful in the arts, just as in other fields, one of course needs talent. But raw, unrefined talent can only take someone so far. The rest of the way for an artist lies in refinement, which means that training and instruction are essential. One can take private lessons, but teachers qualified in the highest degree are becoming scarcer and scarcer and less and less accessible. Colleges are increasingly becoming the best place to find professional-caliber teachers.

This would not be as much of a problem if non-arts and non-magnet high schools (which make up the vast majority of secondary schools) were not in the state they were in at the moment. In recent decades, the focus in high schools has been on the "concrete disciplines:" reading, writing, math, and science. Arts programs - already considered ancillary - have been and are still being cut across the board, narrowing the options for many students, both those who have artistic ability and those who do not. Oftentimes, artistic pursuits are limited to extracurricular or non-scholastic programs.

This is a problem, even for those students who do not choose to study the arts in college. The arts are a wonderful way to express oneself, to discover things that may never have occurred to someone otherwise, and to think in an abstract manner, an extremely essential skill to have, especially in today's world. If the learning that stimulates these things is cut off, then we will eventually be faced with a race of automatons, a human race that will fail to think creatively.

For those students who do choose to study the arts, college is also essential for the fact that it provides rounding. Private lessons act, in a sense, like a trade school does: They train the student to do one thing and nothing else because they teach nothing else. Proficiency in multiple areas gives someone a host of benefits and advantages and makes for a more whole person.

So college serves several functions. As the "last bastion" of the highest-quality instruction in the arts, it is, for most students, the only place they can receive the guidance they need to become professionals. This instruction comes in a context where learning in other areas is also provided, which makes for a complete person. For those students whose focus is not the arts, it allows them the freedom to experience unconventional learning. That is what makes college essential: It's where the concrete and the abstract come together.

Reacting to "Where College Fails Us"

In her article, "Where College Fails Us," Carolina Bird argues that, despite the prevailing beliefs in 1975 (the year in which the article was written), not everyone should go to college.

She cites the growing number of diplomas handed out in certain fields and reports it against the number of new jobs in those fields, showing that there is a vast surplus of trained workers in these fields, which has obvious economic consequences. In addition, she tells us that college creates a caste system of sorts, separating and giving an unfair advantage to those with diplomas when the time comes to look for a job. She also reports that a student investing his college tuition in the bank instead of an education is likely to come out with a large amount more than the comparatively better pay he would make if he had spent it on college. She even tells us that college usually does not teach us a great deal that is "vocationally useful," but instead gives us a lot of useless knowledge.

She concludes by painting a rather cynical view of college: That a large number of professors are unqualified, that colleges take a "hands-off" attitude toward a student's well-being, that more and more students are going to college reluctantly, and that very few of them go for the purpose of actually improving the world. She rounds off this argument by saying that college provides no direction to a young person, and is therefore not worthwhile for a vast majority of high school graduates.

She makes some good points, of course. It's true: College is expensive (Total costs for a year here at USC crest the $50,000 mark), it provides many people with a diploma they will choose or be forced not to use (My mom is a prime example - she has three undergraduate degrees, none of them in music, and works as a freelance harpist), and it fills us with some knowledge we will not use. It also does bias some employers toward hiring those with degrees. As for a university's attitude, she is probably close to the mark here, too, at least for some schools: Housing and meals are overpriced and substandard in many cases, and the school will perpetuate this cycle to make a profit.

I disagree with her on her fundamental points, however. In my experience thus far, I have found that I have changed substantially because I came to college, mostly for the better. Instead of having unqualified teachers, I have received a great deal of world-class instruction in many areas, especially music (my major is vocal arts), but also in incredibly diverse areas such as ancient philosophy and foreign language. Personally, I have found new levels of responsibility, maturity, and social growth.

If I had lacked direction when I came in, I have a feeling that I would have found it here. I have been guided by a great deal of people who have certainly done their part to improve my future already, and my second semester has just started. The bottom line is that by the time I graduate, I will have acquired a skill set that I did not have upon graduation from high school, and this skill set will be essential for succeeding (and by succeeding, I mean performing a job that I love and that earns me the money I need to survive) in the world.

The author does a good job of pointing out the flaws in a decidedly flawed system, but she is guilty of that which she explicitly warns against in her introduction: Mass character assassination. She generalizes about colleges everywhere when looking at the pitfalls of several institutions. The system is flawed, yes, but it is certainly not beyond repair. I have experienced, for instance, the fact that USC is most certainly a for-profit institution, but, as I stated before, I have gotten a great deal out of my time here. Take it from the poor kid: The outrageous costs and money-making schemes on the part of the university are not desirable, but they are worth it in the long run.

So is college for everyone? It must be admitted that it is probably not. But instead of using that presumption to bash the education system, it would be more constructive and better for everyone if we use it to improve the system to cater to the needs of the great We the People. After all, isn't that what it should be for?