The Same Concept Could Apply To OUR Day To Day Lives

George Jonas: Israel needs compromise in a world of extremes

Posted: May 09, 2009, 9:17 AM by NP Editor

It is a mad, mad world. Sane people share it with Kim Jong-il, Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, not to mention the litigant with the bandaged hand. In such a world, there’s nothing more distant than Canada’s cherished dream, the middle ground.

A lawyer tells a story about a man who came to court with his hand bandaged. He was suing another man who had badmouthed him in public, not for defamation but for damage to his knuckles. Infuriated by the slander, the plaintiff smacked his fist into a wall hard enough to require surgery, and now he wanted the defendant to pay for it.The man was quite serious. So was the judge dismissing the case. “If you want his money, sue him for slander,” he told the plaintiff, “and if you want to hurt him, punch him, not the wall. What did the wall do to you? It’s an innocent bystander.”You can tell this happened long ago. Today, a judge would throw out the case without comment.

What the story really illustrates, of course, is how much one man’s sense of justice differs from another’s. Our perceptions are so different, the surprising thing isn’t that we don’t always get along, but that we so often do.

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