It’s always horrible news that a 17-year old is dead. For parents, it doesn’t matter why; it’s just never right to have to bury your own child. So my heart goes out to the parents of Trayvon Martin.
But at the same time, I find my hackles raised by those using this young man’s death as a reason to continue to play the race card when heinous black-on-white crimes are only local news at best. Truth be told, humans are rather a herd animal and it is an inherent survival instinct to profile in one way or another; no species can survive without using visual clues to ascertain friend vs. a foe who’ll eat you for lunch. So unless it happens every day, a black man walking through a predominently white neighborhood is simply going to be noticed, just as a white man walking through a predominently black neighborhood will be noticed. We’re hard-wired to pay attention to something that is different in our immediate environment but if we are to believe we’re really better than “animals” then it behooves us to put common sense to work when something does catch our eye and appears to be out of place.
That means I’m not going to be defending George Zimmerman’s actions here. We are a nation that was founded on belief in the rule of law, not the rule of man and I will let the law do its job and investigate fully what happened last month. That also means that the bounty being collected and vigilantes being encouraged to go to Sanford, Florida by the New Black Panther Party and bring back Zimmerman “dead or alive”, Spike Lee’s tweet of Zimmerman’s home address and the thousands of ugly tweets calling for Zimmerman’s lynching, all being encouraged by the likes of Al Sharpton and even President Lame Duck are not only blatantly hypocritical, they are absolutely wrong and I personally condemn them.
But you won’t get condemnation of black vigilantes or any encouragement for the rule of law from the lamestream media; they continue to do nothing but support racial divisiveness, starting with the first media reports noting Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic” instead of simply “Hispanic”. And posting only a photo of Martin as a child instead of one more recent. And forgetting to mention that Martin was 250 miles from home because he’d been suspended from school and although the father he was visiting claims he’d grounded his son because of whatever wrong behavior got him suspended, he was out on the street after buying treats while visiting his father’s fiancee and her son.
No, no. No real reporting. Just fluff and nonsense like last Friday evening when the ABC Evening News aired what might, if one wanted to be polite, be termed a “human interest” story related to the Sanford incident: they interviewed an obviously middle-class black mother who told the reporter that she “always” tells her sons to act like what amounts to little more than a civilized human being when they go out in public. To whit, pull your hood off when you go into a store (“remove your hat” in the “old days”), carry your purchases in a bag, be polite. We called these things simple manners when I was growing up and god bless the woman for teaching it to her sons today. The problem is that in a desperate attempt to appear somehow relevant, the lamestream media presents this wholly appropriate kind of parenting by a black mother as somehow “wrong” or “shameful” despite the fact that thousands of mothers of every race do the same thing with their sons and daughters every day.
Frankly, it is ABC and every other lamestream media hack that ought to be ashamed. But that’ll happen about the time pigs fly.
To put what so many mothers say into plain English, if you want to dress like a “gansta” and slouch around on MY streets, you can bet that ass deliberately hanging out of your low-slung pants that I’m going to take notice and I’m not going to be pleased to see you. For while self-expression is a fine thing, if you deliberately make the choice to identify with misogynists, thieves, gangbangers and murderers and to go out in public dressed the part, you will be labeled and treated as such when you show up where the majority do not make that same choice. Should you really be a good kid with good parents, I sure hope your mama whips your butt for being such an embarrassment when you get home.
He did say, “OK” to the operator and hwtiin about 20 seconds he was no longer out of breath. (If he was breathing hard after just a few seconds, it would have been audible had he continued the chase.) His acquiescence indicates that his temper was likely not out of control. He may or may not have gone back to his truck, but he clearly stopped the chase when the operator told him to. Zimmerman started to follow Martin, Martin started to approach Zimmerman. They both showed aggression and then stopped, at least temporarily. I’m sure we’ll never know who approached whom after that 911 call, so there’s only conjecture. Either one of them could have been the one to re-engage. Once the fight was on, the guy with the gun “won.”Unless more evidence turns up (rather unlikely at this stage) I don’t see how anyone can assume that Zimmerman is the bad guy. Armed or unarmed, if I were a neighborhood watch captain, I would follow a stranger in my neighborhood, especially after the occurrence of a few burglaries. If he ran off, I might even get out of my car to see where he went. Indeed if I were armed, I probably WOULD feel safe enough to leave my car. Up until the end of that phone call, Zimmerman’s actions were reasonable. Even if he fully intended to keep looking for Martin, what indication is there that he intended to catch him instead of just watch where he went so the police could catch him, especially when they were already on the way? The only “indication” I’m aware of is his reputation. Martin has one of those too. It seems to me all of the speculation on both sides is based purely on emotion and bias.