Margot Fine '03

On May 11, 2001, Margot Fine ’03 and Jim Freeman of Verona Island, Maine received the first two annual William Stringfellow Awards for Justice and Peace. Margot delivered this address as part of the evening’s ceremonies.

Imagining Justice
Margot L. Fine ’03

I am truly honored to be speaking in company with Jim Freeman [the other winner of this year's Stringfellow Award] and in the celebration of William Stringfellow. Both have undeniably shown extraordinary strength, determination and wisdom in their doubting, questioning, challenging, and confronting the established conventional truths in our world. This award inherently recognizes the resistance against tyranny-whether based in class, race, gender, or religion-that many people in this room tonight sustain and advocate in their everyday lives. It is actually amazing to look around right now and see so many different people here tonight who work every day for peace and justice. There is definitely a powerful energy in this room tonight.
This award also is a legacy and continuation of the creative courage of countless people in our world’s history-some famous, but most anonymous to history-who have embraced radical doubt and resisted oppression and tyranny. Although this award has tremendous importance, it is my hope that one day, there will be no need for an award for select individuals who work for peace and justice. I look forward to the day when individuals will cultivate a sense of responsibility in which we understand the universal dimension of our actions and decisions on other beings and the Earth. I work and pray for a tomorrow when we all, as a society, are willing to confront the dominant social and political paradigms and conventional wisdom that all too often are barbaric, inhumane and soul-less, and the day when our world can celebrate our common commitment to breathe together and act together-to create a more sustainable, respectful, and just world.

Since I was about 12 years old, I have volunteered in countless homeless shelters, soup kitchens, nursing homes, and various community projects. At the age of 16, I even traveled to the Dominican Republic to build a school for a neighborhood there. I love doing this work; however, I came to realize that if I was serious about the work I was doing, I had to stop making the poor or the “less fortunate” (as many say) the object of my work and engage with these people as mutual subjects of our lives and history. As a white person from an affluent suburb of New York City, my schooling taught me to think of my life as morally neutral, normative, average, and even ideal; therefore when I did volunteer work a few times a week through middle school and most of high school, I was working with others in order to allow “them” to be more like “me.” I realized then that I could not internalize the ugly and imbalanced human condition that exists but rather that I must externalize my own vision for a more just world. I began to see my significance not in who I was and what I did but rather from the effect I produced on what already was. I continued my volunteer work throughout high school, gradually coming to consciousness of the systematic crimes that existed in our so-called “democratic” society.

I have come to see a community, a state, a world with simply too much suffering and too many injustices. Our ignorance and greed, probably no worse than any other time in history, have now unfortunately been combined with our technological capacity not only to destroy ourselves but also the environmental support system for most of life on our planet. We are living in a time where we can see a true globalization of disparity, where all nations are supporting a growing but still small and obscenely affluent elite, while the poorest become poorer and more alienated from society. Despite the enormous global economic growth in the past twenty years, during this period, the standard of living in the seventy countries where the poorest people of our world are concentrated has actually fallen in relative and absolute terms. Today 475 individuals have more wealth than fifty percent of our world’s population.

Despite the prosperity of our times and some people’s excessive affluence, there are brothers and sisters living on the very margin of existence. Even in the state of Maine (“the way life should be”)-right here in Lewiston, right now-there are people living with totally inadequate food, shelter, education, and health care. The public’s access to information, knowledge, and ideas from all of the major newspapers, magazines, books, movies, television, and radio has transitioned into reflecting only the narrowly and rigidly controlled ideas of a few multinational corporations that own these industries. While our society is unwilling to address the fundamental social and economic causes of criminality, hundreds of privatized prisons have been built in the past five years, and there are significantly more black men in jail in the United States between the ages of 18-23 than in college. The water we drink, the air we breathe, the forests and oceans that sustain millions of different life forms (that were here long before we humans were) are being transformed by our current lifestyle in a manner that raises doubts about whether humans will continue to exist.

Unfortunately, there really has been no serious and/or practical proposal about what to do about the severe problems of health, education, homelessness, joblessness, a soaring criminal population, the destruction of the natural world, racism, sexism, classism, and so many other ills in our world today. Our basic sense of justice alone should suggest that we cannot, and should not, be content with our current lifestyles and the way our society is progressing.

But how can a society initiate and promote a change process that represents the antithesis of the prevailing ethos of that society and its complex social structures, norms, institutions, and culture? I believe that our current situation will improve not by chance but by the active, critical choice of millions of individuals to transform their lives and their societies to ensure global interdependence and justice and free expression of human potential. Each of us must initiate the transforming actions that are demanded by our times. As a society, we must reexamine our beliefs and attitudes, question our assumptions and positions, be critical of our outlook, challenge our perceptions, and confront our biases. We cannot become so immersed in our own reality that we cannot act, so alienated from our sisters and brothers that we cannot speak, so oppressed by what is that we can no longer hope for what could be. Each of us possesses the capacity to transform ourselves and the reality that we all share and, ultimately, to contribute to bringing about a world of equality, justice, and beauty.

The future of human society could be brutal and miserable, as many currently predict; but it could just as well be creative, sustainable, and humane. The future is not determined; it is influenced by what each of us does now within our minds and hearts, in our various communities, and in our various countries. I wish us all the capacity to see what is and to imagine what is not yet, and the strength and determination to create what could be.