Justice Will be Done

We often discuss justice (and lack thereof) on this blog, so we asked a friend of Rally Reform – an adoptive parent who lives in NYC and witnessed the 9/11 attacks – to comment on the death of Osama Bin Laden:

The enormous hole in the ground that was once the World Trade Center was for too many years a desperately tragic reminder of the sudden attack on a day of cloudless blue skies that brought the buildings down, and all those innocents with them. Now, nearly a decade later, as buildings are rising in replacement and the street vendors hawking tasteless “mementoes” of 9/11 have dispersed to peddle fake designer watches to tourists in nearby Battery Park instead, there is finally a reason to revisit the site not in grief and mourning but in tempered jubilation. Last night, soon after President Obama made his stunning, surprising speech, there was a spontaneous outpouring of people at Ground Zero—as there was in Times Square and at the White House—much as there had been outside the Dakota that dreadful night when John Lennon was gunned down. In this city, we live among crowds and we feel safe in them. On 9/11, no one save the first responders dared go anywhere near to the World Trade Center, even if they could have gotten through the barriers, as it was a toxic, burning pile of destruction. On 5/01, coincidentally the day in 1945 when Hitler’s death was announced to the world, thousands gathered to share with the strangers, to acknowledge not death, but vengeance and relief that a madman had finally met his long-deserved fate.

Now of course it would be completely ludicrous to equate the murder of countless souls thanks to Bin Laden and his twisted call for jihad to adoption fraud and corruption, and that is certainly not my intention. But in the small realm of human behavior tracked on this blog, justice has been so rarely served that it is very easy to fall into despair that it will ever happen.

I think of all the innocent children whose identities have been stripped from them so the repugnant and despicable adoption agency employees and their minions abroad can make a dishonest buck and buy a bigger house, and who are not ever punished at all but instead celebrated for “saving the poor children.”

I think of two of the most repugnant and despicable people on this planet – yes, Scott and Karen Banks of Focus on Children, I mean you – and how their crimes against humanity merited little more than a wrist slap (thanks, courts of Utah—you’re the worst kind of sanctimonious hypocrites!). I think of Heta Nua who died in one of Focus on Children’s nanny houses in Samoa.

I think of all the government agencies and advocacy groups (hi there, JCICS, COA, CCAA, NCFA, EACH, FOA, Christian Alliance for Orphans, Wereldkinderen, Craig Juntenen/Both Ends Burning campaign) who pretend that everything is all swell in Adoption Land so they can keep the big bucks flowing.

I think of all the bloggers and authors and advocates who should be blogging and writing and advocating for ethics and are instead blogging and writing and advocating for more of the same filth so they can feel all lovey-dovey about their complicity in corruption.

But the slow and deliberate tracking of Osama bin Laden proved that a steadfast belief in what is right and what is just can sometimes win out in the end. I hope that for all the other pathetic excuses for human beings in this world–who think only of self-aggrandizement and riches–will find that justice may be long in coming, but someday they will get theirs.

REFORM Puzzle Piece