Fair and Impartial Trial in the Court of Cause and Effect

The theory of karma should not be confused with so-called "moral justice" or "reward and punishment." The idea of moral justice, or reward and punishment, arises out of the conception of a supreme being, a God, who sits in judgment, who is a law-giver and who decides what is right and wrong. The term "justice" is ambiguous and dangerous, and in its name more harm than good is done to humanity. The theory of karma is the theory of cause and effect, of action and reaction; it is a natural law, which has nothing to do with the idea of justice or reward and punishment. Every volitional action produces its effects or results. If a good action produces good effects and a bad action bad effects, it is not justice, or reward, or punishment meted out by anybody or any power sitting in judgment on your action, but this is in virtue of its own nature, its own law. This is not difficult to understand. But what is difficult is that, according to the karma theory, the effects of a volitional action may continue to manifest themselves even in a life after death.

--Walpola Rahula in What the Buddha Taught, from Everyday Mind, edited by Jean Smith
Tricycle's Daily Dharma for July 23, 2008

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Today illyaa went away for his first business trip in a very long time. I think it's been years. M, S, and I dropped him off at the airport about 1:40. We were most of the way to Dearborn by then, so we just kept going east to the Henry Ford. We had passes for the Ford Rouge Factory Tour from our local library though the Detroit Adventure Pass program. This is a great program that lets you "check out" passes for 2 or 4 people, depending on the attraction, for many attractions in the greater Detroit area from the library. It's been hard to get the Rouge tour tickets, in general, because they only have so many per branch per week. They were available on Sunday, so S and I each checked out a pass so we could go for $0 plus gas.

I had checked the web site, and noted that the Dearborn Truck Assembly Plant is not currently in production. The exact wording is: "Ford Motor Company is temporarily idling the Dearborn Truck Plant in advance of the truck model change-over during the third quarter. This non-production period is expected to run from July 3 through early September." This kind of gave me the impression that the plant was re-tooling, but it seemed kind of a lot of down-time for that purpose. It turns out that the demand for the F-150 pickup trucks produced there is way down and they don't want to build any more until the next model year. Who'da thunk? lol. Anyway, it was kind of dead. There are things to see besides the assembly line, like the green roof of the plant and a couple of theatre presentations, but my kids were pretty bored walking though the plant. I made them do it anyway. :) The poor docents were hunting down people to talk to. I think we had maybe 10 guests on the bus including ourselves, each way. I am glad I didn't pay money for it, considering. The adventure pass program is set to run through October, so maybe we will try again once school starts.