I suppose I should just get over this whole George Zimmerman thing. The truth is that there is an unimaginable litany of grotesque injustices perpetrated throughout the world every day of our lives. Our own government routinely crushes and incinerates women and children as a function of our holy crusade against Islamic radicalism, a both popular and self-perpetuating foreign policy. All over America, men, women and children of all races are shot and killed each day as an apparently irrelevant by-product of our sacred right of weapons possession. Let me not digress into the state of much of the remainder of the planet, where in abominable places like North Korea people eat grass and corpses to survive and in every corner of the globe evil men exploit and abuse the weak and the defenseless. Sometimes I just feel like giving up, which it appears a substantial number of my fellow citizens have already done.
I should get over it, but I can’t; not just yet. I have already suggested that my having sons around the same age as Trayvon Martin has emotionally affected me in unexpected ways. While my children are not black, they have friends who could be Trayvon Martin; kids who have on occasion raided my refrigerator and left cigarette butts on my patio and parked on the grass even though I have told them not to. As co-conspirators with my own children, they may even have smoked some dope, like about virtually everybody has at some point in their lives. Like my own children, they may even have taken exception to being corralled by authority and may sometimes have taken a short-cut through the backyard of someone they didn’t know. I am still having a great deal of trouble understanding how any of this warrants execution at the hands of a facile, over-aged hall monitor with a bad temper.
Speaking of bad tempers, I am making every effort to control mine. Anger is pointless, since there is not a thing I can do to correct any of this particular injustice, and rage just further assaults my already perilously decrepit cardio-vascular system. Anger is the path to the dark side and, perhaps more importantly, as opined by Sherlock Holmes, passion is the enemy of precision. Righteous indignation is a poor substitute for a reasoned and enduring commitment to justice, so I am going to suppress my fantasies of violent retribution and the sickly gleeful whimsy of seeing the smug, contemptuous proponents of feudal law being visited with the violent death of their own children as a proper form of education. Living only 54 miles away from the beautiful City of Sanford, Florida, I have been tempted to drive over and holler “you suck!” at every 40-something white woman I encounter, hoping my protest would find the ears of a member of the jury. Instead I am going to try my best to develop some perspective, accept the possibility that I could be wrong in my assumptions and surrender myself to the benign indifference of the Universe.
For the record, in my view of that Universe, we humans are only apes with big brains who by force of evolutionary dictate have adequately mastered control of our environment to allow us to procreate in unreasonable numbers and transmit the power of knowledge to succeeding generations. We are not the beloved of God, nor the pinnacle of creation, nor is there any substance to all of the other arrogant self-delusions we so fondly embrace. We are at every moment subject to slipping back into a state of primitivism where the exigencies of survival supersede commitment to any secular or religious principle. We must be constantly vigilant, not against the “fucking punks” that seek to burglarize our mid-priced townhomes, but against our own shallow commitment to decency and respect for the value of human life.
Quite frankly, I have been nauseated at the celebratory cacophony of voices extolling the vindication of the right to “stand one’s ground”. This antediluvian concept, lifted straight from a “B” western, implies that civilization should support people who chose to initiate or prolong disputes to the point of lethal force when they simply could have walked away, as if one man’s pride is more valuable than another man’s life. This is what is so horribly wrong with Trayvon Martin’s death and why I have such difficulty in letting it go. I do not have to know the facts of the ultimate encounter to know that George Zimmerman did not have to put himself into the position of firing a round at point-blank range into the chest of a 17 year-old child. I do not have to know the state of mind of George Zimmerman to know that he had dozens of other choices he could have made that would have endangered no one. I do not have to analyze Florida’s manslaughter statutes to know that deliberately seeking a conflict and then using that conflict as justification for killing deserves to be punished. I do not have to judge the character of a dead child to know that his death is a tragedy. Over and over again in my mind, I keep seeing the image of Trayvon Martin’s lifeless body lying face up in the grass, legs crossed, blank eyes staring into oblivion, uselessly, senselessly and, apparently, legally shot dead, and my heart hurts.
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