Community columnist, 10/16: What if law creates injustice?
StoryDiscussionCommunity columnist, 10/16: What if law creates injustice?
By ANNE KUBR / For the Lincoln Journal Star JournalStar.com | Posted: Friday, October 15, 2010 11:45 pm | (6) Comments

Community Columnist Anne Kubr .
..We are a nation of laws. They are the foundation upon which a democratic society is based. Ideally, each law we pass makes us a better nation.

We struggle, though, to pass just and meaningful laws. We want good laws; we just tend to each want those laws that help us personally. Sometimes, it is difficult to separate our individual needs from the greater needs of our community or our country.

"Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can commit the least act of injustice against the ... individual without having to pay the penalty for it," Henry David Thoreau said.

As we look at laws to support legal immigration and discourage illegal immigration, we need to look at the unintended as well as the intended effects of any law we draw up.

There are some things in life that, unless we are constantly vigilant, will magnify exponentially: weeds, clutter on kitchen counters and, on a more serious note, bigotry. Bigotry is not something that is a part of just a few of us. It is not a part of even most of us. It is within all of us.

Like joy, sadness, anger and the good feeling that comes from success, it is a part of our human condition. History has shown again and again that it is in every people, every nation.

Like the common cold, there is no cure, and it spreads rapidly. One difference between bigotry and the common cold is, however, that colds spread rapidly as a virus moves from one person to the next. Bigotry spreads because we give permission through our actions or words for that waiting within each of us to be released.

Also unlike the common cold, once released, bigotry is not present for a few days followed by a return to normal. It has had enormous and devastating effects on peoples and nations.

How is this germane to our conversation on immigration laws within our states? When a city or a state's law enforcement officials or the landlords of an area must check that each person is a legal citizen of our country on a traffic stop or before he or she rents a home, does that mean that every person is checked or only those who look a certain way?

When we pinpoint people who have, say ... darker skin, black hair ... on such occasions as these, how do we keep our bigotry in check? Have we not, through those laws, given ourselves permission to look negatively at a group of people?

And what if that person who is being looked on as someone less is you, or perhaps your sister, or your mother? The risk is real, to our citizens, to our country, to ourselves.

If a law, in attempting to create justice, has the effect of creating an injustice, we all must stand up and take notice. If a law, instead of making us a better people, paves the way for our frailties to take precedence over our better nature, we have enacted the wrong law.

Gov. Dave Heineman has stated that he is looking into an Arizona-type law for Nebraska. Why? Immigration is in the federal government's jurisdiction.

Our illegal immigrant population is, even by percentage of our full population, a fraction of Arizona's. We are facing, according to the governor himself, a severe revenue shortfall in the next biennium. All of this begs the question: How can we afford the hundreds of thousands or, as has been predicted by some, millions of dollars needed to enact and defend legislation of this type when we don't have enough for the most basic of our state's needs now? And what would be the true cost, not just the cost to the programs and needs of this state that would go unfunded?

To be governed wisely, we must be wise. We are all, in a very real sense, the lawmakers of this land. We must look at the complete impact of each law we consider, especially those that could touch, directly and indirectly, who we are as a people.

Anne Kubr is a sixth-grade language arts teacher in Lincoln Public Schools.

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