No Justice, No Peace

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Can we find lasting peace all by ourselves? Can we be like the earliest Buddhist disciples and retreat into the forest or into our own carefully constructed corners of the world and find the unconditioned peace that we crave? My response to that question is a provisional one: “yes, and…” Yes, and the world has a way of finding us. We arise from it, so this should really come as no surprise. Whatever is happening “out there” will have an impact on our ability to find peace “in here.” Thus, we must cultivate a healthy relationship with the so-called outside world.


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On December 4, 2024, United Healthcare’s CEO was walking from his Manhattan hotel to a shareholder meeting just down the street when he was shot dead by a gunman lying in wait. It appears the killer was motivated by a hatred of corporate greed, and the fact that UnitedHealthcare “dismissed about one in every three claims in 2023…. twice the industry average of 16%” may have focused the killer’s attention on this victim in particular. 

On October 7, 2023, some 4,200 music lovers gathered near Re’im kibbutz, Israel for the Supernova Music Festival were attacked by terrorists who paraglided in from Gaza just five kilometers away. 410 were murdered and many others were brutalized and taken hostage. All told, 1,189 people were killed and 251 taken hostage in simultaneous attacks in the area. What could possibly precipitate such genocidal brutality? Well, that’s a long story. With respect to recent history, though, the Center for Strategic and International Studies states that “both 2021 and 2022 set records as the deadliest years for Palestinians, as the Netanyahu government green-lit the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and settlers themselves conducted pogroms against Palestinians.”

On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old Black youth was gunned down by a white police officer in the middle of a Ferguson, Missouri street. The murder and subsequent acquittal of the police office prompted Black Lives Matter protests to erupt in Ferguson and around the world. How does a seemingly routine police interaction end with an unarmed individual dead? That’s a long story as well, but you can read the summary of the Department of Justice report. 

It was during those Black Lives Matter protests on the streets of Ferguson that I first heard the words “no justice, no peace” being chanted. I didn’t know at the time that the sentiment dates back to no later than 1967 when Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. stated that “there can be no peace in the world unless there's justice, and there can be no justice without peace.” Now, some might dismiss these words as mere sloganeering. On the contrary, I’ve come to understand that “no justice, no peace” is a bedrock truth of the human condition, just as gravity is a bedrock truth of the physical world.

If justice is absent from our legal system, then anarchy is the eventual result. For if no meaningful sense of fairness and rightness results from the legal proceedings involving us and our people, then why would we bother giving ourselves over to its dictates? Certainly those in power can never truly feel safe once people have lost faith in the dysfunctional order that they perpetuate. Those in power might find more and more oppressive ways to force a kind of peace—building bigger walls to hide behind and installing stronger locks on their doors—but they will never know true peace under such inequitable circumstances. Inequity will always nurture seeds of unrest, and those seeds invariably root within us all.

If justice is absent from our economic system, then anarchy is the eventual result. For if no real sense of investment or ownership is allowed for those who must carve out lives for themselves on the fringes of a dysfunctional order, then there is no reason for them to live by the fraudulent social contract that prevails.

If justice is absent from our education system, then anarchy is the eventual result. For if even this one great promised equalizer is seen as little more than an empty promise—with the lion’s share of the nation’s resources siphoned away so that others may get a better education, land better jobs, and accumulate the greatest wealth, all while enjoying better health and all the other rewards of the so-called American Dream—then there is no reason to buy into even this most fundamental value of our land of “freedom and equality.”

“No justice, no peace,” therefore, is a bedrock truth that continues to act in the world regardless of whether we heed it or not. If an insurance company executive cavalierly prevails over a company that routinely and inappropriately denies health insurance claims—destroying the financial security of families in the process—then they cannot really expect to walk the public streets in peace and safety. Somebody will eventually become angry or frustrated enough for violence to erupt. And if the nation that you live in supports the theft of Palestinian land, ghettoizes millions of others, and controls their movement, employment, and acquisition of resources, then you really can’t expect to stage a music festival just a few miles from that cordoned off ghetto—even if it is billed as a celebration of "friends, love and infinite freedom" or as a celebration of “music as a vehicle for joy and unity.” And if you’re white and live in a city that is two-thirds Black, but the mayor, police chief, and 50 of 53 police officers are white, and you disproportionately rely on fines for “crimes of poverty.” from those Black residents to fund city operations, then you really can’t expect to live in peace without some minor but harassment-tinged and tension-infused police interaction resulting in a frustrated and angry response that ends with an unarmed youth murdered and your city burning all around you. 

How then shall we integrate justice work into our spiritual practice—or bring spiritual depth to our justice work—so that we may begin to act more deeply in accord with this truth? It is a question not so easily answered. Perhaps our practice begins by reflecting on this very question! 

 

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 This post is in the Power, Practice, and Peace series.

Find a running list of all posts in this series by clicking here.

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The Power, Practice, and Peace logo background is a stylized rendition of graffiti photographed by the author just a short distance from where Michael Brown was killed at the hands of a white police officer.

 

Copyright 2021, 2024 by Mark Robert Frank

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