Between Justice and Reality: An American Fracture

Between Justice and Reality: An American Fracture

By Alula Asfaw

One night, I heard gunfire. Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta.

The next morning, our Ring camera showed a man clutching his abdomen, blood soaking his shirt, leaping our fence and scraping across our van. Blood streaked the metal. When the police arrived, one of the officers was someone we knew, someone who had become a friend. He quietly called the fire department, and they hosed it down. We had young children, and we tried not to let them see.

For a long time, I resisted writing about Donald Trump.

Not because I lacked opinions, but because I worried the subject would tempt me into shortcuts — caricature, condemnation, certainty. Understanding is harder, and understanding is what our moment lacked.

Trump did not appear out of nowhere. He rose from a landscape already cracked — from towns hollowed out by economic change, from communities stripped of dignity, from men and women who felt culturally invisible, from people who no longer recognized their country.

When fear goes unnamed by responsible leaders, it does not disappear; it searches until it attaches itself to something. I have always resisted the temptation to mock or dismiss the white working-class men who supported Trump. It is easier to blame people than to confront systems, to shame than to imagine.

A porous border is not sustainable, drugs have devastated communities, and disorder corrodes trust. None of that is abstraction — I have lived it.

In Over-the-Rhine, in Cincinnati, I watched drug deals happen in broad daylight and knew the dealers by name — they lived on my street. I watched people buy substances and be so consumed by addiction that they could not walk two blocks to safety. They injected themselves in alleys. Addiction was not abstract; it was neighbors, sirens, ambulances, funerals. I learned that despair is not limited to poverty.

I have known pilots and soldiers, professionals and parents. In our lowest moments, all of us are vulnerable — without community, without moral scaffolding, without belonging, despair metastasizes.

I had friendships with police officers in District One. Through those friendships, I came to understand something of the exhaustion and grief that accompanied their work, and how overwhelmed they often felt by what they encountered. Then came the videos — George Floyd, Eric Garner, so many others. What had been easy to deny became impossible to unsee. And yet, even then, we could not reason together. We did not ask, "Is this wrong?" We asked, "Which team am I on?"

I watched the Black Lives Matter movement take shape with admiration. The anger was righteous, but I worried about what would happen if it was not accompanied by a strategy, a serious diagnosis of the problem, and the institutions necessary to sustain meaningful change. "Defund the police" became ammunition, and the movement was judged by its weakest slogans instead of its deepest truth.

MSNBC and Fox News disturbed me for years — not because they disagreed with me, but because they performed disagreement. They cultivated outrage, making the other side unrecognizable. Journalism once saw itself as public service; now it often sees itself as entertainment, and entertainment rewards conflict.

When COVID arrived, the fractures widened. Masks, vaccines — questions of shared responsibility became tribal symbols: freedom versus obligation, individualism versus solidarity. I remember wiping down groceries, worrying about my parents, holding my newborn daughter in the middle of a global emergency. And then, almost overnight, it ended. No reckoning, no mourning. We went through something traumatic and pretended we hadn't.

• • •

Months later, on an ordinary afternoon, someone climbed through our window. I was coming up the stairs with Gatorade for my sick daughter when I saw him halfway inside. Disoriented. High. Sweating. I didn't think. I grabbed him by the collar. I hit him. Again. And again. I felt numb. Detached.

Afterward, I sat on the floor and shook. My wife had ushered the children into their room and closed the door. Later, she said, "I thought about what my brother would have done." It devastated me. Part of me wanted her to be proud — to see me as a protector. Instead, she was surprised. My fists were sore for days. Even now, my hands tremble when I think about it. What frightens me is not that I defended my family, but how easily I became someone else — how quickly something primitive surfaced.

Someone in Rwanda once compared humanity to a scratch ticket — thin, fragile, easily torn. I used to understand that intellectually. Now I understand it bodily.

This is not about whether the man deserved it; it is about what I learned about myself. I did not need to become violent to know I am capable of violence — just as I do not need to become addicted to know I am capable of addiction. In my lowest moments, I am no better than the people I see shaking in alleys.

Reinhold Niebuhr had given me a language for the uncomfortable fact that I could love my family, believe I was protecting them, and still be frightened by what I had done. I had read him as a warning against being too certain of my own goodness. On the floor of our home, with my hands shaking, that warning was no longer about other people. William James mattered to me for a different reason: he made me take seriously the distance between what I hoped I would do and the habits I had actually formed. I could not count on my intentions alone when a moment arrived for which I had no time to prepare. I used to read these ideas as philosophy. Now I read them as autobiography. We require community, ritual, institutions, love, accountability, and grace; without them, we are more vulnerable than we care to admit.

• • •

In Minneapolis, federal agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

I know what fear did to me in ninety seconds in my own stairwell — how quickly another version of myself appeared. So the question Minneapolis puts to me is not whether those agents were evil. That is too easy. The harder question, the one my own hands asked me, is what keeps a human being entrusted with power from surrendering to the worst thing inside himself: what institutions, what habits, what restraints, what forms of accountability.

It is easier to direct our anger at individuals than to confront the systems within which they act. Accountability matters, and so do practical reforms such as body cameras and training. But these measures alone cannot answer the deeper question of how we cultivate the judgment, restraint, and sense of responsibility that the legitimate exercise of power requires. We have lost the capacity to reason together about life and death. When is killing justified? When is authority legitimate? When does force become murder? These are moral questions, and a society that cannot speak morally cannot govern itself. The burden falls on those who can still reason, listen, and believe that we owe one another more than outrage.

Civilization does not rest on the belief that good people are different from bad people. It rests on the moral and institutional scaffolding that allows fragile people to remain human.

For years, I had turned to books to understand the distance between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. Richard Rorty helped me recognize how much of what I took for granted had been shaped by the accidents of where I was born, where I grew up, and whom I encountered. That recognition made it harder to imagine that people who saw the world differently from me were simply beyond understanding. Alasdair MacIntyre pressed a different question on me: what kind of life, shared with other people, could give my convictions substance over time? I was drawn to his insistence that character is formed in practices and communities, not in private declarations of principle. I have not resolved every tension between those two ways of thinking, and I do not need to pretend I have. Both have stayed with me as I have tried to hold justice and reality in a single vision. But none of these ideas mattered until they were lived. Until fear met flesh. Until theory met blood. Until conviction met temptation.

That is where philosophy becomes character and learning becomes life — between justice and reality, where we are formed.