Justice and Accountability are Scary AF

So we build walls and bombs instead.

What We’re Really Afraid Of

I was dropping my youngest daughter off at school Friday, and instead of my normal thoughts about school traffic and how I wish we had a competent bus system in the county, I started thinking about justice.

We’d been doing our daily routine of singing along to music. Today we ended on a run from the Great Gatsby broadway show. I guess thinking about Gatsby and wealth took me down a road I wasn’t planning to go down at 7:45 in the morning.

Here’s where I ended up: I think what people are actually afraid of is justice. Not crime. Not immigrants. Not China. Justice.

The New York Times editorial board has been on a tear lately. They have been promoting the hell out of a military build up. They published a piece called “Overmatched” about how our military can’t keep up with Russia and China. We lose the war games. We can’t produce missiles fast enough. We need to spend more, build more, arm more. And I found myself thinking: what if we didn’t? What if the United States and China, these two industrial and technological superpowers, were working together? Exporting ideas, exporting medicines and doctors, building renewable energy infrastructure, running transcontinental transmission lines, lifting people out of poverty and fear and anxiety. What would the world look like if our measure of strength was how much we could heal instead of how much we could destroy?

But that’s not how we think. When you have a sprained ankle, you don’t heal it by slamming it on the ground over and over. You rest it. You let it heal. Everyone knows this about their own body. Yet when it comes to the world, we almost never think of healing as a solution to conflict. We think safety comes from pushing people down, not lifting them up.

Look at Gaza. We supported this genocide. We’re still supporting it. And there’s zero accountability. The world watches a country commit genocide against a people and basically nothing happens. No one stops them. That’s terrifying in itself. It’s like walking through your neighborhood and watching someone get beaten with a lead pipe while everyone just keeps walking. That kind of world - where atrocity happens and nothing follows - creates its own anxiety. Its own fear.

And now look at what’s happening here. I was reading last night about the detention camps in Florida - what they’re calling “Alligator Alley.” Amnesty International is reporting that people are being put in hot boxes. Human rights abuses. Some of the people running these places have been charged with sexual assault, torture. The thing that “can never happen here” is literally happening here. And the feeling I had reading it was helplessness. The inability to stop your own country from torturing people. From creating heinous violations of human rights. It’s a wild feeling. And it leaves the same anxiety, the same fear, as watching a genocide unfold and knowing your tax dollars are paying for the bombs.

This pattern runs from the biggest scale to the smallest. At the global level, we think we’re in a zero-sum competition with China. One of us will be dominant. At the national level, we think safety comes from striking fear into people through guns and prison violence. That’s what stops crime - not lifting people up, but the threat of dominance. At the neighborhood level, we build walls, put up cameras, install ring doorbells. It’s all the same instinct. The belief that safety comes from having more than others and protecting what you have from those who have less.

But here’s what I think is actually happening underneath all of it. One of the things that has made white Americans afraid of Black people over centuries is guilt. Knowing, somewhere in there, that these people have been exploited and fucked over. And rather than face that guilt, rather than pursue justice, the response is fear. Fear of what justice might require. The same dynamic shows up everywhere. The fear of Irish immigrants. Italian immigrants. Mexican immigrants. The fear of poor white communities - “white trash.” What people actually fear is economic justice. They fear their own guilt, even when it’s not expressed, at having so much better lives than others.

Because we know. Deep down, the way we knew as children, that there’s no real justice in it. There’s nothing good about keeping someone impoverished enough that they’ll clean your house for pennies. There’s no justice in a world where some people work their whole lives and can’t afford a home while others inherit more than they could spend in ten lifetimes. We know this. And instead of pursuing justice, we build walls. We build prisons. We build bombs. We tell ourselves we’re protecting what’s ours from people who want to take it. But what we’re really doing is protecting ourselves from the weight of knowing that none of this is just. And that real safety - the kind that doesn’t require dominance, the kind that doesn’t require someone else to have less - would require us to change.

I dropped her off, watched her run toward her friends, and drove home thinking about all of this. Hopefully next time I’m only thinking about the bus system. But I doubt it.

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