By Alan Caruba
I can only speak for myself, but I
want to be relieved of having to change the channels in order to get away from
too much talk about Trayvon Martin and too much talk about George Zimmerman.
From all that I have read and heard,
Trayvon was a wannabe street thug with a taste for drugs, tossed out of school a
couple of times, and George was a wannabe police officer who ended up on his
back, getting his head pounded into the cement, and concluded Trayvon might just
kill him. George should have left
after calling the police. Trayvon should have kept going too. But people
make bad decisions and it sometimes gets them killed or on
trial.
The trial was a self-defense case from
start to finish. That’s what the jury found even though Florida’s “Stand Your
Ground” law wasn’t even introduced by Zimmerman’s attorneys and, even though
race was not introduced as a factor during the trial by either the prosecution
or defense.
The trial, though, was all about
race.
As a student of history, I and others
can tell you that race has always been a factor in the life of the nation. In
America it divided the states and required a horrendous war to resolve. Even
then, after the end of the Civil War and for a century more, despite
Constitutional amendments to end slavery and extend full citizenship, race
remained an ugly factor, especially in the South where Jim Crow laws were
especially obnoxious. In the 1960s the nation had to revisit the issue of civil
rights.
I know all that, but I still want the
endless discussions about race to end now that the jury has arrived at a
perfectly common sense conclusion that Zimmerman, straddled—not by a “child”,
but by full grown young man—had no real option other than to shoot him or risk
suffering further injury and possibly death.
I know I am contributing to the
millions of words written and spoken about this case at this point and I wish I
were not. I don’t want to write about how weary I am of the media orgy that
continues to feed off the way a minor incident in Sanford, Florida, metastasized
into a trial and a national discussion of what has been discussed to death—race
relations.
It is passing strange to me that the
killings of white men and women, boys and girls—often killed almost
randomly—have not evoked such supposed “outrage” in neither the black, nor
white, community. Indeed, they are treated as little more than brief local news.
Why do we expect, barely report, and not even publicly condemn such killings
when the racial component is reversed?
Whites watched the Saturday protest
rallies in cities across the nation with the resignation that comes with having
concluded that nothing they say or do is going to have any effect on this kind
of political, racial, kabuki theatre. Indeed, the Zimmerman-Martin affair was
deliberately turned into a political event even though local police
investigating it had concluded no crime had been committed. That was the jury’s
conclusion as well.
What rankles are the “Justice
for Trayvon” posters and chants. Trayvon Martin got justice. George Zimmerman
got justice.
What Zimmerman has not gotten is a
President who should not have intruded himself before and after the trial. I
don’t really care that Obama is the first black President, even though he is
half-white. He should have kept himself out of the discussion. Instead his
community organizer instincts and not his degree in law kicked in. Nothing he
said before and after the trial was helpful and all seemed to have little
purpose than to stir up the divided passions on both sides, black and white.
I do not want to hear or read any more
of this event. I do not want to hear more about Trayvon Martin. I do not want to
hear more about George Zimmerman.
This nation is on a runaway train to
the kind of bankruptcy that we just saw occur in Detroit. If it isn’t
reversed—insane government borrowing and spending—then it won’t matter what
color you are.
© Alan Caruba,
2013
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Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning Signs" and shared on dozens
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