5 Feet of Fury

Jim Goad on Milwaukee: ‘Social justice’ now just ‘revenge,’ and Martin Luther King, Jr. partially to blame

Jim Goad writes:

As much as I don’t want to crawl into the minds of the dunderheaded Milwaukee rioters, I suspect that they beat and burned and smashed and slashed due to some half-baked notion that all of their problems were due to “injustice” rather than, oh, the statistically high possibility that they never met their fathers. Pretending that you’ve been victimized by “injustice” must be a soothing balm for the wounded souls of congenital losers.

A highly troubling thing about the concept of “justice” is that I’ve never heard anyone so much as attempt to define exactly when it will be achieved to their satisfaction. Since “injustice” is indefinable, so is “justice.” The quest for justice appears to be insatiable. Whoever gets a little bit always seems to want a little bit more. Despite how much they insist that “social justice” is a real goal, they keep moving the goalposts. (…)

The oft-chanted mantra “No justice, no peace!” carries an implied threat. If you don’t give us justice as we define it—and you don’t even get a right to define it, because you’ve been designated as the perpetrator of injustice—we will burn your whole city down. That’s probably why MLK posited an either/or selection between “social justice” and rioting.