No Sense
O.K., Puzzle me this: Are those who seek Social Justice socialites? Oh, wait…that ID has already been claimed by the people who cause social injustice. Just wondering because I’ve been seeing these “No Peace, No Justice” bumper stickers for years and, each time, I marvel at the exquisite ambiguity of those words (and the thinking of the mopes who adopt it as a slogan). I mean – the smug sanctimony coupled with the veiled threat, and couched in infinitely variable language is probably as compact a summation of the angry, pointless crusade as anything out there.
Peace, to be fair, is not nearly as endlessly interpretable as justice. Still, it’s impressive enough. There’s the famous Pax Romana, recently in history transmogrified by anti-war protesters into the even jazzier Pax Americana. Same bloody connotation for each, only – with the latter – it’s Americans calling fellow Americans murderers. Just a little nuance. And there’s World Peace, an abiding goal of all of us, but something Lefties seem to feel is achievable in our lifetime and, therefore, should be reflected in national policy.
There’s peace in the sense of the lull between wars; and there’s the peace you experience within yourself in the absence of strife. There’s peace as an armistice between combatants, and there’s eternal peace that believers in the afterlife achieve, er…after. Let’s not forget “Peace in the Valley.” Elvis liked that one a lot. And of course, if you threaten to make my life miserable – however you can manage – then that’s extortion, whose absence is peace. All I have to do to get the peace is give you whatever it is you think you deserve. Good deal. Works against individuals, businesses and governments, to name a few.
But what if, instead of money or privilege, you want something a little harder to define; something, in fact defined by you alone. What if the shakedown is justice? Well, that’ll bake your noodle. It immediately occurs to you, the victim of the extortion, that this justice thing can be reinterpreted anyway the demander likes, and as often and varied as possible. Maybe you should call a Justice of the Peace. (Do the bumper-sticker bozos have a Justice of the War?) The war against peace and for justice, of course.
Seriously, look at the panoply of justice beliefs around the world. Some folks think it’s perfectly just to bury a rape victim – after all, she brought shame on the group by being raped – up to her neck and then stone her to death. Maybe someone should disturb their peace. I’ll skip the beheaders and hand loppers; already a tired meme.
Mao thought justice would be served by periodically turning his people against one another in order to brutalize those who were slipping a bit in their belief in his earthly paradise. That’s a little Social Justice for you. Maybe he thought of it as ‘socialization.’ After studying carefully in France for a while, Pol Pot returned to his home country of Cambodia with an army of teenagers armed with AK47′s to exact a little justice on his middle-class countrymen who weren’t, in his view, leading a good, revolutionary life. So he marched them all out of the cities and worked them to death, for their own good. Justice served. Millions dead.
Sorry, getting a little maudlin; you get the idea, though. Sarajevo, Rwanda, North Korea, Cuba – social justice seems to require a lot of human sacrifice. I didn’t bother to mention the USSR because everyone knows that an otherwise perfectly fine revolution was screwed up by Stalin; no reflection on Communism – force for good in the world as illustrated by a few of our previous examples.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we Americans seem to think it serves justice to subject our kids to political indoctrination and segregation from mainstream society. They grow up with heads full of useless crap and an inability to function in society. There is hopefully a special room in hell for those who place their own careers (and ideologies) ahead of these kids’ future. Social Justice. We all know this goes on, and we feel helpless to do anything about it.
So, maybe the next time we spot one of those “No justice, no peace” bumper stickers, we can reflect on whether it’s better to side with the symbolists and nihilistic fist shakers, or, in the name of social justice, work to have an educated, responsible society that knows it’s lame to want the government to be your mama.
Which once again brings us to our delightful feature:
FREQUENTLY UNASKED QUESTIONS
- Is it peace to preach national disunity and shame over your nation’s past?
- Is it peace to selfishly legislate your neighbors’ freedoms away in order to satisfy your quest for civic virtue, or to eliminate behavior that annoys you?
- Does social justice mean fairness and equality, or freedom and opportunity?
- Isn’t “No justice, No peace” a guarantee of permanent conflict?
- Who benefits from permanent conflict, freedom lovers or tyrants?
- Is it likely that the American founders already invented a socially just system, but one that needs more maintenance than it’s been given?
