(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.
