Rightness is the stance of all who do harm in the world.

They do the harm because it is right to do the harm, because not doing the harm would be wrong.

They control to make things go right.

They blame to correct for how things went wrong.

Take, for example, our Criminal Justice System. It’s right there in the name. It is a Criminal System, a system which perpetuates crimes from the stance that crime is wrong and ought to be met with crime.

Is the crime this justice enacts large enough to reflect the crime enacted? That’s what we are asking when we ask about sentencing.

We agree that there are RIGHTS. To life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and we agree that for wrongs committed, one foregoes these rights.

I had to work within this system to see it for what it is, and see it for what it made me, and see the consciousness as it still stood in me, yodeling warcries, long beyond my vow to stop doing violence to my loved ones.

Still, I say we call it what it is and I hope we all remain blissfully ignorant about just how much protection that system affords us.

Take now the harms of war. If we do not do harm to them, they will never stop doing harm to us. If we do not harm them for how they harmed us, they will get away with wrongs. In order to make this right, we must echo and reflect a similar wrong unto them. We must do this until they bow, acknowledging that we are right and they are wrong.

It is madness, yes, because it is SLAVERY. In allegiance to right and wrong, I become a slave to doing actions I say are wrong when presented to me in a different context. I become a slave to the punishments and imprisonments I levy upon others. I am bound, always, to a cycle of retribution or reparation. I am distracted from the larger world, confined within a small, problem-oriented cell of it.

I stopped doing the right-wrong dance. It’s part of my practice of Radical Responsibility.

I HAD TO stop, because I made a vow to myself and god to stop doing violence.

ALL of my violence came down to my strongly principled stance of what is right and wrong in this world, particularly how right it is to punish wrongs.

Beyond the land of right and wrong, there’s simply the experience that has my attention right now. There’s simply the context in which I am held, and my limited ability to influence that context to foster my imagined ideal.

Where is my attention in this moment? What is here for me now? What of the infinite offering commands my devotion?

If injury commands my attention, how do I devote to nourishing myself?

If fear commands my attention, how do I cultivate my own experience of safety?

If delusion commands my attention, how do I reconnect with reality?

Here now, there is nothing whatsoever to do in righteousness, in rebellion, as repair, for retribution. Here now, there is this, exactly what is here. There is my choice about how to engage with what is really here in reality.

There is an equal choice for me to take refuge in narrative abstractions. In any moment I have the right and the ability to suffer on behalf of things I imagine and invoke into the here and now. In any moment, I can imagine I am right and cause here and now harms based on my imagination about how the world “should” be.

Someone could easily call this wrong, but it’s just as right as it is wrong. That’s why I had to move all the way beyond these concepts.