Starbroken

Category: religion

  • There Are Four Lights

    There Are Four Lights

    (And a recipe for mushroom turnovers)

    (Click here to skip to the recipe for my great-grandma’s mushroom turnovers.)

    So I’ve been thinking about Trump’s anti-transgender executive orders recently. Specifically, that first one, the one where he purports to define sex in terms that sort every human being into one, and only one, of two distinct and immutable sexes. It’s a template that’s played out more or less the same way in state houses across the country; the language differs from instance to instance, but the concept is the same. “There are only two sexes,” these policies, bills, and orders scream out at us, “and you can’t change yours.”

    They’re wrong, of course. We know full well – because we’ve had a long time and dedicated scientists – that sex is neither binary nor immutable. The people writing these screeds know it, too. If sex were immutable, they wouldn’t have to try so hard to stop people from changing their sex; if it were a natural binary, they wouldn’t have to add carve-outs in all their bills banning sex-altering surgical procedures for children to say “it’s totally okay if the surgery is to take an intersex infant” – though they wouldn’t use that term – “and make their sex binary.” These people aren’t making definitions; they’re making demands.

    To be clear, if you’re not incarcerated, the government can’t physically stop you from changing your sex. It’s an incredibly simple and easy thing to do, physically speaking – something which terrifies right-wing operatives. All you have to do is rub a bit of the right gel on your skin on a regular basis, and you’ll find your sex changing. Some of these gels are unlawful to obtain or possess. Some aren’t. None of them are hard to obtain or possess, if you go looking. Even if the government were to successfully make it illegal to change your sex – an unlikely proposition short of complete Constitutional collapse – they couldn’t physically stop you. But they’re not trying to physically stop you.

    All the terrifying things Musk and his lackeys are doing to the government, all the policies Musk’s number one ventriloquist dummy Trump are trying to enforce, they all boil down to the same principle. These fascist goons want you to ignore reality, ignore truth, ignore learning and research, and pretend the world is what they say it is. From their stances on trans rights to their foreign policy to the way they’re constantly lying about what it is that the college fucking freshmen of DOGE are doing to the payments system of the US fucking Treasury, they want you to ignore the real world and act like you live in the world they want.

    In their world, you’re powerless to do aught but obey. There are two sexes, and one of them is better than the other. No, you’re not allowed to pick which one to be, are you some kind of communist? In their world, the only thing that matters is the power to do violence. From God down to the President down to the cops down to the man of your household down to his submissive, feminine, stay-at-home wife, to their beautiful, white, abused children, the only things that matter are power, submission, and punishment.

    I know because I grew up in that world. Anywhere from a tenth to a full fifth of the American population grows up in that world: the world of evangelical Christianity. I won’t get into the history of evangelicalism here, nor will I get into the specifics of the things evangelicals believe. Because the thing that matters most is their tactics.

    It starts with controlling information. The false reality of the right is jerry-rigged and inconsistent, so if people get even a whiff of the real world, they start to see how the false one’s coming apart at the seams. In evangelical households, this takes many forms. A ban from TV or movies, for example – explicit Christian propaganda excluded, of course. Strict parental controls on any Internet access, not to filter out pornography, but to filter out *science.* An insistence that their children shouldn’t visit the library unsupervised, and that the parents should read every book the child wants to check out, cover to cover, to ensure it doesn’t contain any unauthorized thoughts or ideas.

    Music? Art? Absolutely not. These things bare the depths of a person’s soul; these sorts of evangelicals will avoid any music or art that isn’t explicitly Christian in nature.

    Public schools teach things like evolution, and more insidiously, the idea that government should be secular. And worse, public schools are open to immigrants and queers and black people. No, best to send the kids to a private, Christian school with strict anti-queer policies and tuition fees high enough that most immigrants and people of color are excluded. The attitudes of the staff will be enough to exclude the rest.

    If these sorts of evangelical parents are doing their job right, from birth until college and even afterward, their child will never leave the bubble of false reality that’s been painstakingly held up around them. And these are the tactics that the Musk/Trump administration wants to implement in our society at large, by making their demands in the form of policy statements.

    “There are only two sexes, and you can’t change yours!” “Diversity is racism!” “The government has been persecuting Christians, and we’re going to put a stop to that!” “Canada would be better off as the 51st state!” “We’ll own Gaza!” “The Panama Canal belongs to us!”

    It is the hope of the Musk/Trump administration that if they lie often enough, loudly enough, forcefully enough, if they threaten enough journalists who call them out on their lies, they can build a world where their lies are true. Well, not true true, but close enough for government work.

    In a particularly poignant episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation, Captain Picard of the Enterprise is captured by the fascist Cardassian regime. His jailers torture him brutally for information, but he doesn’t talk. Eventually, the Cardassian in charge of Picard’s interrogation hits upon a new technique. He shows Picard four bright lights, then tells him there are five. When Picard insists there are only four, the Cardassian tortures him again. This goes on for some time, with the Cardassian offering Picard comfort and safety if he would only agree that there are, in fact, five lights.

    It almost works. Just before Picard breaks and tells his torturer that there are five lights, another Cardassian arrives and sets him free. His crew have come to rescue him. On his way out, weary and broken down, he shouts at his jailer: “There are four lights!”

    When he’s recovering on his own ship, he later admits that by the end, he was starting to be able to see that fifth light.

    The first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – signed by almost every country on Earth, America included – states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” If you haven’t ever read the UDHR – and if you’re an American, there’s a decent chance you haven’t – you can find it here, at the United Nations’ website. It’s one of the more inspiring documents I’ve ever read.

    It starts from the premise that all human beings are inherently free and equal, in a way that the United States likes to pretend it did. And it starts from that premise because it’s the truth. To be human is to be free, and to be free is to be equal. If you put human beings under oppression, inequality, or tyranny, it is our nature to rebel and resist. Maybe successfully, maybe not. But rebellion and resistance will happen.

    The Musk/Trump administration wants a world in which people are born to obey or to be obeyed, and they’re willing to pretend very loudly that we all live in that world. Their hope is that if they’re loud enough, they can drown out the most fundamental truth of human society: You’re a human being, damn it. And you were born free, and you were born equal to every other human being on Earth. Your body belongs to you, and you can do with it what you please, providing it harms no one else. You can build friendships with other people, people that are like you and people that aren’t, if you want to. You can create community together with people from all walks of life, from all corners of the Earth, with different languages and ideas and philosophy and music and art and food – and the diversity of perspectives and ideas will make this community better and stronger and more free.

    Your government can form meaningful relationships with other governments, your community can form alliances and friendships with other communities, crossing lines both geographic and linguistic – and this will make your country better, stronger, and more free.

    You can hold a deep, meaningful, powerful faith and hang onto your freedom and rights as a human being at the same time, because these things aren’t opposites. You can let people live in the places they’re from, and you can let them live in the places they want to go. You can help them defend themselves against terror and tyranny, dehumanization and erasure, and everyone involved will be the better for it.

    You can reach out to others with open hands of friendship, not closed hands wrapped around the grip of a gun, and you’ll be better for it.

    Compassion, love, peace, justice, friendship, and yes, freedom – these things aren’t weaknesses. They’re strengths.

    There are four lights.

    The Musk/Trump administration will get louder, more forceful, and more violent about their bullshit. Most media platforms, being owned by billionaire oligarchs, will cave and start pretending that the false reality painted by the right-wing is the real world, and that the siren song of liberty doesn’t beat in every human heart. The government will attempt to paint those of us who believe in freedom, equality, and dignity as crazies. Extremists, perhaps, or radicals.

    It’s not extremist, not radical, not even unusual to see four lights when the regime insists there are five.

    We’re at a turning point in America. As unelected shadow president Elon Musk would put it, a fork in the road. On one path that lies ahead of us, we don’t fight back against right-wing narratives. We try to carve out little niches for ourselves in the society of power and violence they’re trying to build; we fight for our rights, but on the fascists’ terms and on their turf. And we lose.

    On the other path ahead, we start from the bottom up. We start by proclaiming from the rooftops to the streets, by shouting from the mountains to the valleys: We’re human beings, damn it, and we are free. We build our politics and our communities around freedom and equality, we let people choose for themselves what to believe and where to go and what to think and say and do and be. And when would-be tyrants try to keep us from our freedom, we hang onto every last inch of it, with every means at our disposal. We fight tooth and nail, we salt the fields behind us. Because to be human is to be free, and I’ll die before I let anyone take that away from me.

    And I hope to God you’re with me.

    Great-Grandma Lehmann’s Mushroom Turnovers

    Ingredients (makes 25 turnovers)

    • 1/2 cup margarine
    • 8 ounces plain cream cheese
    • 1 1/2 cups flour
    • 1/4 cup water
    • 1/2 pound white button mushrooms, minced
    • 1 large onion, minced
    • 2 tsp chicken stock
    • 3 tbsp butter
    • 1/2 tsp thyme
    • 1 tsp salt
    • 1/4 cup sour cream
    • 2 tablespoons additional flour
    • 2 eggs

    Directions

    1. Mix the margarine, cream cheese, and water together, then add the quarter cup of flour. Mix by hand and form the mixture into a ball. Refrigerate for at least an hour, preferably overnight.
    2. Over medium heat, sautee the mushrooms and the onions in the butter. Add the thyme, salt, sour cream, chicken stock, and the 2 tablespoons of additional flour. Mix well.
    3. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
    4. Crack the eggs into a small mixing bowl and whisk them until they’re a nice smooth, consistent liquid.
    5. Take the ball of dough you made in step 1 and roll it out flat. Cut it into circles about two and a half inches in diameter. Place a teaspoon of the filling you made in step 2 into the middle of each of the circles of dough, then fold the dough circle over the filling to make a half-moon shape. Press the edges together with a fork to seal them.
    6. Arrange the turnovers you made in step 5 on a standard baking sheet; use a sheet of parchment paper to keep them from sticking to the baking sheet. Poke holes in the turnovers to let steam escape, and with a basting brush, give them a light coating of the beaten eggs from step 4.
    7. Bake the turnovers for 12 to 15 minutes, until they’re a nice golden brown.
    8. Enjoy!

    (Click here to jump back to the blog post.)

  • The Peace of the Justice

    (Click here to skip to my recipe for Starbreaker’s Southwest Spicy Sunrise Surprise.)

    This post was written – and rewritten a few times – before the new year, so forgive the slight discrepancy in dates within. Thanks!

    There’s a palpable sense in my circles right now that justice is dead. On Bluesky, in the streets of the very liberal city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in other places not dominated by the right, there’s an air of tragedy and grief. Trump’s election is a part of it, sure. He very obviously tried to stage a coup d’etat against America, then got re-elected America’s president anyway. He’s openly promised he’ll use our country’s legal system as a weapon against the people he despises. Immigrants, journalists, Democratic politicians. President Biden’s rumored to be mulling over the concept of preemptively pardoning federal employees to save them from Trumpian witch hunts come January, a sentence which sounds absurd.

    And the CEO of America’s most notorious health insurer was gunned down in the streets in New York. That happened, too.

    The mood after that particular event has been… enlightening. I don’t know a single person who has more sympathy for UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson than they do for the gunman. Corporate executives broadly are in something of a panic, while average joes across the country have takes ranging from “It’s about time.” to “That’s not justice, but I can’t feel sorry for the man.”

    It’s clear that something has died this year in America. But anyone who’s bothered studying a less propagandistic version of American history than most high-school textbooks will give you knows that justice died here long, long ago. From the Three-fifths Compromise to the War on Drugs, from the Trail of Tears to Vietnam, America has never truly had justice. Not for everyone, at least.

    The thing that’s died in America is the peace.

    Not “peace” generally, the peace. If you’re familiar with the peace at all, it’s probably from such classic phrases as “disturbing the peace” and “justice of the peace.” Of course, those phrases are rarer than they used to be. A lot of things that used to be “disturbing the peace” are now specifc offenses under state and local codes, when they’re not just… constitutionally protected speech, and most American states haven’t had justices of the peace for decades. So, if you’re not familiar with the peace, let me give you a refresher.

    The peace is a legal concept in America that predates the Constitution. It was brought over with the first colonists, along with the rest of England’s common law. From the legal system’s perspective, it just means what’s happening when nobody’s breaking the law. It’s the status quo ante, the way things are supposed to be. The charge of “disturbing the peace” can be anything from playing your music too loudly to just… daring to protest in public. Now, sure, the latter charge would probably get thrown out by any halfway-competent judge, but the point is that the peace, from a legal perspective, means whatever the people enforcing the law consider to be the default state of affairs. If you punch a cop, you’re disturbing the peace. If the cop punches you, definitionally, he isn’t.

    The thing is, the legal perspective is only part of it. The definition of peace used for the legal concept of the peace isn’t the same one used in “peace and quiet.” It’s the one used in “war and peace.” The English concept we imported, “the king’s peace,” had a specific alternative: bloody, feudal war. The king’s peace was a specific way of running society. If you, some noble asshole, had a disagreement with some other noble asshole, you didn’t call up your levies, ruin your harvests, and tear up all the land between your pretentious castles. Instead, you petitioned the king’s justice. The king would make a choice, tell you who owed who what restitution, and there wouldn’t be war.

    Crucially, the king’s peace wasn’t a guarantee. It was only ever as good as the king’s justice – or rather, the perception of the king’s justice. As long as people could reasonably presume that their grievances would be redressed by the king, they wouldn’t try to break the peace. Of course, it was also feudalism, so the requisite backstabbing and complete disregard for anyone who didn’t descend from some storied line of nobility was threaded throughout the whole thing, but by the time it got imported to America, it had mostly reached its final form, the one we have today.

    The peace in America is backed by the same thing that the peace in feudal England was: the perception of justice. As long as the majority of the people with power – and remember, in America, that technically means anyone who votes regularly – believe that the legal system will adequately redress their grievances, they don’t try to take those grievances into their own hands. Now, like I said, justice in America has never existed for all Americans. But most Americans have, until quite recently, believed it did. It’s even the end of our absurd pledge of allegiance we make the schoolchildren swear daily – “justice for all.”

    Whether you believe that Donald Trump tried to overthrow the United States of America and largely got away with it (He did.) or that nefarious anti-white forces stole the 2020 election from him (They didn’t.), you’re probably pretty convinced that the legal system in America is being used as a cudgel to oppress people, rather than actually providing justice. (It is.) And frankly, in a country with America’s alarming rates of gun ownership, I’m surprised we haven’t seen more assassinations sooner. There were two attempts on Trump’s life during his campaign this year, a frankly insane number of attempted assassinations of a presidential candidate. The assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare has created, whether deservedly or not, a new folk hero for a huge number of Americans.

    The king’s peace isn’t the only way to live. The alternatives are a lot worse, of course; nobody wants to have their villages reduced to rubble and bloody mud. But those alternatives exist. In a feudal monarchy, the person on the throne is always deeply aware that those alternatives exist, and if they’re a competent ruler, they’ll do their best to make sure nobody ever considers them. Here in America, it’s safe to say that many people had forgotten. I don’t think anyone’s forgotten now.

    And with Donald Trump at the reins, there’s no chance we get the peace back the way we had it. Justice will be a joke fairly soon, even for the people who’ve been protected by our travesty of a legal system for decades. So what can we do? Is American society doomed to fall apart into a violent free-for-all?

    Well, no.

    To have a peace, we do need a justice. But there’s no reason the justice has to come from the President’s men. There’s no reason “making our own justice” has to mean violence. It can just as easily mean finding trusted members of our communities – our neighborhoods, our friend groups, our towns and schools and workplaces – and having them mediate. As a Christian, I know for a fact that my God wants Their followers to be peacemakers; I also know that many other religions and faiths have similar attitudes. There are a lot of people in this country that could be called upon to mediate, to make local, homegrown justice. And that justice will bring local, homegrown peace.

    Neighborhood peace won’t bind the rich and powerful, unless they choose to let it. But that’s the thing with the coin that is justice and the peace: you can’t have just one side of it. If we’re to have a peace, we must have a justice. That which protects must also bind. As the peace in America continues to fall apart, that realization will come to the people in power eventually. It always does.

    I genuinely hope that this is as bad as it gets, that there’s a great lightbulb moment in every C-suite and every Congressional office before some other grief-stricken American with a gun or a truck or a knife or a decent grade in high-school chemistry does something stupid. I wish that I could have enough faith in the people of America to believe that it won’t get worse.

    (January edit: 2025 started off with a politically motivated mass murder in New Orleans, a politically motivated suicide in Vegas, and the largest confiscation of homemade explosives ever by the FBI in Virginia. It’s looking like a lot of people with guns, trucks, and/or decent grades in high-school chemistry are going to do stupid things this year, and I hate it.)

    I don’t have that much faith in us. I think it’ll get much, much worse before it gets better.

    When it does, remember this and remind the people in your life: There’s an alternative to all that chaos. People can be part of the peace, if they choose to be part of the justice.

    Starbreaker’s Southwest Spicy Sunrise Surprise (a macaroni salad to wow the midwestern neighbors)

    Ingredients

    • 1 box elbow noodles
    • Mayonnaise
    • Yellow mustard
    • 1 can chipotles in adobo sauce
    • 1 can green chiles
    • 3 eggs
    • 6 ounces shredded four-cheese Mexican blend
    • 6 strips of bacon, thick-cut
    • 2 jalapenos
    • 3/4 teaspoon smoked paprika
    • 1/2 teaspoon granulated onion
    • 1/2 teaspoon granulated garlic
    • 3 reasonably sized scallions

    Directions

    First, cook the elbow noodles following the manufacturer’s instructions, then after draining them, place them in a large mixing bowl. Fill the pot you used to boil the noodles with enough water to completely cover the eggs, and bring the water to a boil again. Once it’s boiling, add the eggs and let them boil for 12 to 15 minutes.

    While the eggs are boiling, open the can of chipotles and remove the chipotles themselves. Pour the excess adobo sauce into the mixing bowl with the pasta. On a flexible cutting board, dice the chipotles into pieces no larger than 1/4 inch on a side, then scrape them and the excess sauce this cutting will make into the mixing bowl with the rest. Stir the mixture.

    Slice your jalapeno peppers in half lengthwise and remove the inner ribs of the pepper, taking care to not leave too many seeds in the pepper, then dice them to 1/4 inch pieces like the chipotles. Add these to the mixture.

    Open your can of green chiles and add them to the mixture as well. Give the mixture another good stir.

    Cook the strips of bacon in a frying pan; you want the bacon cooked, but not crispy. When it’s ready, chop it into pieces 1/4 inch on a side, then add those to the mixture as well.

    When the eggs are finished boiling, peel them, slice them in half, and pop the yolks out into a large (gallon sized) Ziploc bag. Take the whites and dice them up into pieces, you guessed it, about 1/4 inch in size. Add them to the mixture along with the shredded cheese, the garlic, the granulated onion, and the smoked paprika. Stir vigorously.

    Take your mayonnaise and mustard and add them to the Ziploc bag. The amounts aren’t precise, as we’ll be adding this mixture to taste in a moment, but you want a ratio of about 2 parts mayo to 1 part mustard. Once the yolks, mayo, and mustard are all in the bag together, bleed the air out of the bag and seal it.

    Using your hands, squish and mash the bag until its contents are well-mixed. It doesn’t have to be precise; a few chunks of yolk are okay. When you’re satisfied with the mixture, cut a corner off the bag (about 1/4 inch from the corner itself) and start adding it to the main mixture in the bowl.

    Stir the mixture while you add the mayo-mustard-egg yolk mix, and stop adding the mix when the mixture reaches your desired level of wetness. (I like my macaroni salads to have a good amount of mayo, but tastes vary on this matter.)

    Cover the large mixing bowl and refrigerate overnight.

    When serving the macaroni salad, take a clean pair of scissors and cut a few 1/4 inch pieces of scallion over each serving for a bit of visual – and textural – flair.

    (Click here to go back to the blog post.)