The Justice Project:
Overview: In this project we learned about different kinds of justice (Environmental, Societal, Racial), different philosophies, and different philosophers. We learned and created our own meanings of Justice, we made monologues explaining our definitions of justice, and why we care about the things we do. And most importantly, our final project was supposed to reflect our philosophies of justice.
Justice Monologue #1: With so many people on the planet, there are bound to be various definitions for Justice and different kinds of Justice. In the reading “Compassion and the question of Justice” by The Dalai Lama he states, “Most of us recognize justice as a universal principle of fairness based on our fundamental equality as human beings” but in this reading, he challenges this premise with his own opinions and philosophies. In the criminal justice system, they believe compassion conflicts with punishment, because compassion shows forgiveness, and you can not give people their rightful punishment with forgiveness. But you must view the justice system with compassion for everyone in the situation to benefit. In our criminal justice system today, if you do something bad enough to get the death penalty, there is not really a way out of it. This means our system follows deontology, where if you act out of duty the decision is moral. But I believe there should be other alternatives, like actual rehabilitation, and not just being beat in a cell by wardens all day. Dalai Lama states he believes any human being has the ability to change, and the death penalty forecloses the chance of that human changing. In the Buddhist religion, they believe in karma, so if you do something bad, something in that matter will happen to you as well. So there is no reason to give someone death when what they did can just come right back to them. I do not follow any religions, but if I were to follow one, it would be Buddhism because their philosophies and beliefs coincide with my own.
I will not say that we should just let people do whatever they want and not punish them for the things they do, but I think we should not be so uncompromising about taking people’s lives for the things they do. You may do one bad thing in your life, but it does not mean you will stay that way forever, so I do not think temporary problems should be solved by permanent solutions. The Dalai Lama stated, the past is no longer in our control, but the way we handle past crimes is in our control.
I will not say that we should just let people do whatever they want and not punish them for the things they do, but I think we should not be so uncompromising about taking people’s lives for the things they do. You may do one bad thing in your life, but it does not mean you will stay that way forever, so I do not think temporary problems should be solved by permanent solutions. The Dalai Lama stated, the past is no longer in our control, but the way we handle past crimes is in our control.
Justice Monologue #2- Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYgmrErmiVc&t=1s (sorry about the sound quality, youtube completely compressed it)
Final Justice Project: (GOFUNDME) www.gofundme.com/f/xqr8k-a-cause-i-care-about-needs-help?utm_source=customer&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_campaign=p_cf+share-flow-1
The picture above is our finalized donation box (this will all be going to community compassion outreach to give to the homeless community in Durango)
Below I included some screenshots of our group chat to prove we were staying in touch the entire time, and screenshots of emails between me and the teachers
Project Defense and Project Reflection: Part 1: Project Defense
Part 2: Project Reflection
- What did you end up doing for your project? For this project I worked with a group, our project was to get donations from a gofundme (https://www.gofundme.com/f/xqr8k-a-cause-i-care-about-needs-help?utm_source=customer&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_campaign=p_cf+share-flow-1) and use those donations to buy things that the homeless community in Durango needs, and then we will give those things to community compassion outreach. Things like tents, masks, sleeping bags etc.
- How did your project reflect your personal philosophy of justice? Our project reflected my personal philosophy of justice because I believe that all people should have the same opportunity to feel cared for regardless of their situation in life. I personally have seen a lot of homeless people in my life and I have always felt bad for them, but something I do not see a lot is people helping them. So even though we can not donate much I feel everything counts. I think all it takes is one mistake and anyone can end up in the same position, and The Dalai Lama once stated in a reading we read that “Most of us recognize justice as a universal principle of fairness based on our fundamental equality as human beings” and I mostly agree with that statement, but I do not think people really include the homeless in that statement, because I do not see them being treated fairly.
- Did you do sufficient research and background work to pull off your project? We did not do much research besides looking up costs of items and what the homeless community needed. But,we did do the research that we needed to do for our project. Personally the background work that I did was communicating with the teachers about our gofundme and other things, keeping in touch with group members, and helping with the spreadsheet of items.
Part 2: Project Reflection
- In what ways were you successful in meeting the goals you established in your project proposal? What contributed to your success? Our project changed since my initial proposal. Originally we were going to sew masks and put hand drawn art on them and give them to a reservation near us to help out with COVID spread, but due to rules and stuff we were not able to do that. Instead, we made a gofundme, and using the donations from that we got certain items from a list that community compassion outreach gave us. And we were able to get a decent size box of items to give to them, but not all of what we wanted to give. Some things that really helped with our success was that all of us stayed in touch over snapchat daily, and that we had support from our teachers and classmates.
- In what ways were you unsuccessful in meeting the goals established in your proposal? What contributed to your failures? What should you have done differently? The main way we were unsuccessful in meeting our goals was that we did not get anywhere near our donation goal (40$ out of 300$). Something that contributed to our failure was that we relied too much on the thought that other people might care about the cause, and that ultimately stopped us from getting more items. Another thing that contributed to our failure was COVID, if COVID was not around we would be able to just hand out things to the homeless community ourselves instead of having community compassion outreach give our items to them. I believe maybe if we had put aside our own money into the project first, and then used money from the gofundme, then maybe we could have been able to donate all the items we wanted to. So, we did not reach our donation goal on the gofundme, and we are not going to be able to give the community the amount of items we originally wanted to.
- To what extent did you SHOW UP for the project? How engaged/ committed were you in the work? I feel like I was mostly pretty engaged in my part of the project, there were definitely some times where I fell behind the rest of my group, but I was able to catch up every time I was behind. For example, my group was talking with community compassion outreach the day after I was supposed to discuss with the teachers, but everything got sorted out and was just fine. For the most part, I feel like I was engaged in our project, and I definitely cared about it enough to try and make it beautiful work.
- What two key lessons did you learn from this project that you can apply to the senior project? One of the two main things I learned from this Project was that, you should definitely rely on yourself first before you rely on the people around you. And the other main thing I learned was that a lot of people have certain things that they are very passionate about, and even want to bring awareness for them inside a place like school, and I think that is amazing.