The cost of injustice

TO live in Karachi, or really any city in the tumultuous world that is our reality, is an exercise in dodging misfortune. When one leaves the house, one braces for survival. Traffic has to be navigated, angry or errant drivers avoided, beggars ask for money and there is filth on the street. By the time one reaches the destination, one is in a state of high vigilance. Dangers and disruptions are everywhere. This means that most in the city live in a constant state of hypervigilance. Some would say that wealth can insulate a person from this avalanche of potential misfortune. There is material evidence of this: the wealthy have drivers who take them places, their cars and homes are cool with air conditioning and electricity outages are eliminated with generators. They see the best doctors and eat the best food.

If you belong to this class, the injustice that you see everywhere in a megacity is made distant. The maimed beggar, the dog being beaten, the woman wrapped in black trying to navigate a street full of men are things that exist in some different world. The car window, the tall gate, the armed guard — these, it is assumed, make the cruelties of the context irrelevant. If they are considered, it is only in a calculation that assures you that your good fortune is deserved and those suffering must have earned it through some arithmetic of divine distribution. The truth is that life in an unjust society exacts a cost. It does not matter how well you may take care of yourself; context matters. In her extraordinary book Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society, Dr Arline Geronimus has shown that the constant physical toll of coping with injustice can have deep physical and mental consequences. Naturally, the most disadvantaged suffer the…