I was recently surprised to learn that one trait associated with dyslexia is an acute sense of justice.  I always thought that dyslexia was a sensory disorder that affected sight and sound and how the brain processes them.  Apparently it is much more.  Perhaps it is not necessarily a disorder at all, rather it accounts for differences in how we think, assimilate, reason, conclude and how we relate to all of those processes.  It is a disorder only when it impedes our ability to do any of those activities.  I mention all this because after completing an inventory associated with dyslexia, I discovered that I meet many of the traits that underlie this condition, especially the one having to do with an acute sense of justice. 

Another trait connected with dyslexia concerns reading.  Like most dyslexics, I am not a good reader.  It is such a burden that I cannot recall ever having read a book from beginning to end.  I typically read only the beginning, then skip through short passages, and then I read the end.  If it has pictures, I skip rapidly from the end to the beginning. That often gives me a reverse visual chronology of how the ending came to be.  I dread getting bogged down in dialogue.  For the emotional part of fiction, I prefer to watch a good movie, while the actors emote with gusto.  When I write, my fingers often misspell, misuse, or omit words that my brain is thinking.  Spell check is my best friend.  About as often as not, however, I think in images rather than in words.  Perhaps that accounts for my gaps as well as my gaffs.  If all that makes me weird, so be it.  I am hard-wired for weirdness. 

My concept of justice is different from most accounts of that term I hear or read about from others.  It seems to come up most often in connection with the law and retribution.  If I injure you, society seems to believe it has satisfied its collective sense of justice when I am fined, or imprisoned, or when I am compelled to do some sort of community service.  Those linkages all flow from the notion of an “eye for an eye,” or with karma, or it has theological origins.  Not so with me. 

Justice has only to do with correcting things that impede you or me from going about our lives in pursuit of our desires, our objectives, or our goals.  Litter bothers me.  It does not belong on the ground, or in our lakes and streams, or any place other than in a bin that is destined for a landfill or recycling.  A dog with an injured leg bothers me.  A child receiving a public scolding bothers me.  A homeless person bothers me.  Unwanted hunger bothers me.  All the conditions of poverty bother me.  The mistreatment of people or animals; abusing or polluting the land, the seas, and the air are affronts to my sensibilities of what is just.  Rules, customs, and prevailing notions of who gets to the front of lines for higher education or health care, and who gets denied the same rankle me.  And that is because such rules more often than not are centered on wealth, privilege, and status.   

Just 175 years ago one-third of what is now the United States was owned and occupied by Mexico.  The states from Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado were all part of Mexico in the 1840s.  There is still a huge Mexican-American population in the western US today.  Most of them have relatives in Mexico.  All have ties, associations, friends and ancestors in Mexico.  We (the settlers from Northern Europe and their offspring) took all that land from Mexico in the most egregious way—partly by annexation, and partly by paying a pittance for it when we had Mexico and its Mexican soldiers pinned down at our mercy who were only fighting to keep what was legally theirs.  

By any standard of decency and justice, we should have a special set of laws, rules, and customs that acknowledge our long-standing relationship with Mexico, its people, their contribution to our culture; and one that honors them for their service to America during every war since 1847.  Work permits and accelerated citizenship could never repay the injustices we continue to heap upon those who dare to cross back into the land of their fathers.  We dishonor ourselves and our heritage by insisting on building walls of separation with Mexico; and when we treat all who cross our border in search of work as if they were rapists, thieves, and terrorists.  

Thomas Jefferson must have been partially dyslexic.  He held that all the foregoing conditions and senses of right and wrong were not dysfunctional at all; rather, they were directly tied to a Creator, and thus were beyond the reach of men, or governments, or laws.  As to my mental health and that of others, I am inclined to ask “Who has the mental health or learning disability, one who wants to build walls of separation, or one who wants to tear them down?”