I am sure Charles Pierce enjoyed writing this piece. It feels good to be an artist at the top of your craft, riffing on something that works and packs punch and tells truth to power. It’s powerful imagery that Mr. Pierce creates, with Zimmerman back on his old beat, armed and ready to take on all the fucking punks and assholes in true Charles Bronson style.
But Mr. Pierce misfired from the get-go, starting with his opening sentence.
However, in theory, at least, here is what is now possible.
What he means is that everything that follows is only “now” possible in light of the jury’s ruling in the Zimmerman case. That’s the wrong construction. It’s a misunderstanding. The Zimmerman trial jurors didn’t write any laws. They didn’t issue any judicial opinions. They didn’t create any actual legal precedent. They didn’t give anyone any authority to do anything. Blaming the jurors or even the result of the trial for anything that happens in the future is not an intelligent thing to do.
Mr. Pierce appropriately concluded his piece by quoting John Dos Passos: “All right we are two nations.” And Mr. Pierce placed himself squarely in one camp. He doesn’t want to hear the other camp. He doesn’t accept even an iota of validity in anything the other camp thinks. But the other camp thinks there are a lot of fucking punks and assholes in the world who do things like break into single mother’s homes, which warrants people like George Zimmerman setting up Neighborhood Watch programs, and warrants calling the cops when an unfamiliar black kid in a hoodie is walking around the neighborhood in the rain. They think it matters when black kids commit crimes and that it makes sense to profile black kids if those are the kids who have committed crimes in their neighborhood in the recent past.
The biggest scandal in this country right now is the way we just accept, as not even being newsworthy, the day-after-day drumbeat of black kids dying in our streets. But most of those dead black kids are being killed by other black kids. If you want to call them “assholes” or “fucking punks,” I guess you can take that attitude, but the vast bulk of “besieged” communities are black communities.
I can’t even catalogue all the causes of this crime and violence, but I know that when we aren’t indifferent to it, we tend to take actions that make it worse. People don’t want to talk about it, but one reason that Trayvon Martin is dead is because other black kids roughly his age committed crimes in The Retreat at Twin Lakes and inspired the Community Watch program. It is true that Trayvon’s only crime is that he looked like them, but the reason we can’t understand Zimmerman’s supporters is because we won’t acknowledge the inspiration for the Watch program.
I have already written about how the other side cannot hear us. They do not understand what it is like to be under suspicion just because of how you look. They don’t know what it is like to be treated as expendable by the police or the courts. They don’t see the human costs of racial profiling.
But, what Mr. Pierce misses is that this trial and this verdict didn’t create any new reality. It brought an existing reality into stark relief. Zimmerman got off because of pathologies that have developed in the system.
The people have supported laws that make it difficult to disprove self-defense. They’ve made it easier to get away with shooting someone. This case was lost because the law was heavily biased in Zimmerman’s favor. The trial didn’t create those conditions, they existed already.
What we need to do is to come up with a plan to stop the violence in our cities. Because everything flows from that.
Update [2013-7-16 11:10:35 by BooMan]: Here’s my response to Mr. Pierce’s response.
Brilliantly said, BooMan.
Booman, I hope you are going to give us some ideas about stopping the violence in our cities. I live in a much smaller city in the center of a Southern red state. While all politics at the state level and in much of the suburbs is controlled by the GOP, the city itself is governed by Dems, the overwhelming percentage of whom are African American. We’ve a terrible homicide and burglary rate in much of the Eastern and Southern part of the city. Lots of black on black crime, gangs, and killing. The white answer to that is to continue doing what they’ve done for decades, ceding the public school system over to Blacks and those white families who cannot afford private school tuition and moving further and further out and even to neighboring counties where public schools aren’t under quite so much stress.
Not satisfied with running away, the white establishment continues to work legislatively to defund the public schools while criticizing every move and decision that elected or appointed black officials make. We will never solve our problems if we continue to run away from them. So, I actually blame those of us who’ve turned our backs on our fellow citizens thereby allowing the entrenched problems to continue to fester and spiral out of control. We need some visionary citizens who have the courage to turn back towards the city and its disadvantaged citizens by addressing, to begin with, the jobs issue, i.e. the lack of them. Everything will flow from there.
If ever a massive jobs bill was needed our cities do need them. If the President could see his way to accomplishing that, he will definitely assure his place in history.
I agree.
Racist stereotypes persist because people who resemble racist stereotypes exist.
Booman, it’s a distinction without a difference.
Michelson and Morley didn’t “create” the speed of light, but, by conclusively demonstrating its constancy, they changed the world (and made Einstein’s insights possible).
By conclusively demonstrating the state of Florida law (and, by extensions, the legislative conditions in many ALEC-derivative jurisdictions), the Zimmerman verdict reveals what, for most people, were merely speculative fears to be hard legal truths. Some of us had a similar reaction to the Bush vs. Gore decision: suddenly, we knew where we really stood, and it was scary.
Your writing on the topic has been very interesting, as usual. But you’re focused on the verdict (and its correctness) and I’m afraid that that focus is blinkering you from seeing the real picture here. We live in a society set up in such a way that these actions are permissible and legal: Pierce (and others) are reacting to this; reeling from it as (for example) Jimmy Breslin and Norman Mailer reeled from Nixon’s election victory in 1968.
And (making a different point) the problem is “violence in our cities.” The problem is guns, and the fundamentally-racially-based fears that allow our barbaric gun laws to perpetuate.
I can’t edit my comment, so I have to fix my typos here: “by extension” (singular) in the second paragraph, and, at the top of the fourth paragraph, “the problem is not ‘violence in our cities.'”
No, the problem isn’t guns. The problem is vigilantes like Zimmerman. The gun didn’t cause him to kill. The gun was the agent he used to kill a “coon”. Would you feel better if he had stabbed him in the heart or hung him with a rope?
Respectfully, I hate that argument. It’s nonsensical.
The argument ignores the idea of expediency; it ignores all the circumstances of the violent act. It’s based on an imaginary zero-sum game where we start with the murderous impulse as some kind of absolute human animus and expect that it’ll be carried out no matter what, whether with a gun or a fist or a sharpened screwdriver.
Obviously this isn’t the case. The whole point of a gun is how easy it makes it; how you can feel “safe” because you’re carrying an “equalizer;” how the “playing field is leveled” (and your “man card” is renewed or however the NRA propaganda puts it) because of the weapon. You can kill on impulse; you can kill on a whim. You can win a fight that would, as a pure physical confrontation, have you running away, apologizing, hiding.
Look at Bernard Goetz; look at the gunfights of the old West. You think Howard Ford would have tried to murder Jesse James with a knife? You think all those domestic disputes and home invasions and drunken bar fights would have ended in murder, without guns? It’s just not a realistic view of the world; it’s not a reasonable argument. Look at all those little children killing each other with their parents’ guns; at least once a month for the last year!
This is why when the Neigborhood Watch group organized,
I don’t think the jury did anything wrong, but morally as opposed to legally Zimmerman was out to kill somebody black. Whether he knew it himself or not.
We can argue in endless circles the “guns don’t kill people” crap. The reality is that the
SYGKAN law would not exist if not for the NRA, its twin ALEC, and the gun industry lobby and its supporters. There’s no clean way to separate the object from the enablers.I agree, Jordan …. this is indeed a distinction without difference.
The jurors didn’t issue judicial opinions, they didn’t create legal precedent, and they didn’t give anyone authority–but they issued a cultural opinion, they created a societal precedent, and they gave many people the confidence to act on their real-or-imagined authority to stalk and murder young black men.
I think they did even more than that: they validated the KAN, formerly SYG, laws as open excuses for lynching by gun. I find Boo’s equanimity on this beyond stunning.
I lived in LA when the Rodney King verdict came down — close enough to the rioting that I choked foul air that resulted from the fires set by rioters — and yet among people I was in contact with, we understood the anger and the injustice of the verdict. If there was any gloating amongst white people, I didn’t see it.
The OJ Simpson verdict did create a rift between the AA and white communities. Too many white people didn’t get it that it was virtually impossible that OJ would ever have been convicted by a jury of his peers. The acquittal instead of a hung jury was a bit of a surprise, but that was more confirmation of how weak the case was and how good OJ’s defense team was than a substantive change in the final outcome. White folks were miffed, but in general African-Americans didn’t gloat. We all knew the truth and while difficult for many, had to accepted the decision.
The responses to this case feels worse. The right-wingers are uglier. The “liberals” are behaving as unthinkingly and convicted Zimmerman before facts were known and haven’t bothered to understand the applicable laws. Maybe 9/11 did change everything and we become a nation of people ruled by our Ids.
Beautifully put, but–the applicable laws don’t seem to apply to reality.
That nothing has changed. This ain’t your parents’ United States of America any more. Culturally I think Charles is on to something and with his working-class instinct I think he has pretty accurately channelled the feelings of both partisan factions. If nothing has changed why does the Right seem triumphant and I feel dejected and morose, imagining exactly some of the diabolical scenarios Pierce evokes?
The Right is sick of arguing with us, they want us armed so they can shoot us all down with a clean conscience.
I think you’re right. This feels like something new.
I remember Rodney King and I remember O.J. Simpson; all the hand-wringing and puzzlement and “Can’t we all just get along?” and attempts to make sense of what had happened.
This is different. Everyone knows the score; no matter which side they’re on, everybody understands exactly what just happened.
Yes, I have come to that conclusion too; with only this caveat: some on the right haven’t faced, or refuse to, the barbarity among their the co-horts. It is the psychological mindset of the conservative mind- an inability to empathize with the “other” , an offshoot of the tendency to close their minds against multiple perspectives.
Neighborhood Watch programs are supposed to watch and call the police, not arm themselves and execute suspicious persons. George Zimmerman is a fucking MURDERER!
Good community policing programs involve more than just watching, but your division of roles as to who is armed is correct. Excellent community policing programs over time likely would result in a reduction of weapons in the community purchased for self-protection, running counter to the general cultural fearmongering.
Maybe it’s different in your state but here in Illinois we were told to watch, observe, make notes, call the Village police, but never to confront or threaten anyone. We were told in no uncertain terms that we are are just homeowners watching our community NOT police in any form. The term “community policing” here refers to our CSO’s, Community Service Officers, who are uniformed employees of the Village government that handle many services traditionally performed by police such as issuing parking tickets, citations for violating other village ordinances such as noise or trash violations and rescuing cats up trees etc. They wear uniforms (with CSO shoulder tabs), drive police cars (marked ‘CSO’) but do not carry weapons or investigate crimes. Neighborhood Watch is as I described, just homeowners with no official function or authority, just citizens cooperating with the police.
Our CSO’s encouraged “block parties” and other events to get neighbors to know each other and build relationships so that folks knew when neighbors were having guests so as not to call in false positives. In addition the neighborhood watch decided to pursue some preventive activities, such a pre-teen program at the local library and community athletic association summer programs. Budget cuts have affected CSO’s and it’s not the favorite role for male officers building their careers, but we have dealt with some serious issues successfully with these relationships. And they require constant maintenance to keep vigilance. The problem is that CSO’s must cover an increasing number of neighborhood watch groups as they get organized and work with people in neighborhoods where neighborhood watch groups have lapsed.
They seem more organized than mine. I live in a Republican village. This is the old Country Club/small business Republicans.
How are you politically organized in NC? In VA, there were the state and the county/city. Two levels, that’s it. IL has a myriad of overlapping local governments. I just checked my property tax bill. I have sixteen separate taxing bodies, not counting the state which doesn’t tax property.
Z got off because there was not proof beyond a reasonable doubt he had broken the law.
You need to examine why there was not proof that he had broken the law. And what was it about the law that allowed such different outcomes from the same prosecutor as this verdict that of and the 20-year sentence of a lady who fired warning shots into the ceiling to scare off her abuser.
Not a chance in hell. Whenever anything remotely approaching a conversation comes up white people make the dumbest comments, forcing black and brown people out of the room. And then they’ll just concern troll about being called racist when no one actually said that. That was probably all I saw this weekend. “I’M NOT LIKE THAT STOP ACCUSING ME!!!” I guess they’re afraid of the policy implications a majority of them have supported that have actively hindered other races of people; always telling others to take responsibility, never once thinking that maybe their favored policies is what’s responsible. Bootstraps, bitches.
We all are like that in fact. Our culture has an implicit set of racial and ethnic categories and corresponding valuations of people that are a part of everyone’s subconscious socialization. Folks who claim “I’m not like that” are uncomfortable when they bump up into the stereotypes that our culture propagates and behave with the prejudice in discrimination that our culture models. We focus on the conscious and unrepentant white racists and mark them to be IMO rightly stigmatized for what they are. (Cultural pressure begins to deal with the underlying racism.)
But we too often ignore the cultural racism that infects the ability to openly trust, which is why white progressives complain, often rightly, that minorities have a chip on their shoulder. And minorities complain, often rightly, that white progressives have not dealt with their racism.
It’s the institutions and values associated with those institutions that perpetuate racism; folks like the GOP only exploit that for political advantage. To understand the deep institutional problem, talk to a black police officer or a black male first-line manager. And discuss what they can’t talk about at work and what they come home and pray away.
The unconscious slights I experience because some black people distrust me as a default attitude are minor compared to that.
And yes, after 48 years on the conscious trail of becoming a repentant racist, I still run into a thought or a mannerism or a behavior that I haven’t yet purged of that cultural beast.
So important. Saying “I’m not racist” is like saying “I have no lead in my bloodstream.” It’s environmental for white people in the US, and it takes work to overcome the effects. We’re never quite sure we’ve gotten there, and we need to live with it.
Non-NeoConfederates in general, and people of color in particular, have been under intensified attack since November 4, 2008. The complete and utter hatred that these people have for us has driven them completely mad, to the point where not only will they block any and all laws that would benefit the American people, they will go out of their way to enact laws that would aggressively harm those citizens – including their own supporters. There is apparently no line they will not cross, no conspiracy they won’t embrace, no level of hell they won’t attempt to subject us to – all in the name of their false supremacy.
I fear that they are creating their own self-fulfilling prophecy. After all, If you continually put it to people that you consider them less than “real” Americans, less than decent people, less than human, and deserving of being shot down in the street with absolutely no consequences whatsoever, what do you think the eventual outcome might be?
As to solutions, you assume the NeoConfederates want one. They DON’T. And so long as our obstensible allies attach “yes, BUT” to everything, we won’t get any closer to one.
Booman – the misunderstanding you ascribe to Pierce is a misunderstanding on your part. When he says “here it what is now possible” he’s not saying that this verdict has now made it possible for others to do what Zimmerman did. He’s saying that it’s possible for Zimmerman himself to do it again. Pierce’s piece is personal, not general.
The verdict – as you point out – is not a “ruling” that would affect other cases – but it does affect George Zimmerman, who as a direct result of the verdict can now – with the same gun – repeat his crimes – and I mean moral crimes, not Florida crimes. The correct verdict, (which due to the utterly evil law and the poor prosecution would have been manslaughter and 30 years), would have removed the proven danger he presents to society, and THAT verdict would have had a more far-reaching effect in that it would have deterred others.
And no – I’m not afraid to confront the fact that there is a ton of crime in cities that can only be alleviated by changing the way our economy works and that in the meantime this making life a living hell for law-abiding citizens of all races. In the absence of a solution to the root problem, the remedy for these symptoms is to hire more highly trained police, not to arm stupid, angry, redneck vigilantes.
Yes! That’s what Pierce was communicating.
What is talked about even less is how prosecutors overcharge in order to get plea deals instead of jury trials. What is talked about even less is how prosecutors slow-walk the delivery of discovery evidence to the defense so as to ensure that defendants do jail time before trial, sometimes substantial jail time. What is talked about even less is that the ability to afford counsel substantially affects the outcome of a case, and Zimmerman had the best counsel for his case that money could buy, thanks to those institutions in society who want to keep his sort of vigilantism alive. The result is that it is the poor and especially blacks and Hispanics who do jail time.
Yes, there are crimes committed by black kids that folks can focus on and excuse housing discrimination that comes along with discrimination in the distribution of education funds and employment discrimination. With long lectures from parents working two, three, and four jobs about personal responsibility even as kids see that personal responsibility is causing parents to work longer, be home less, and be arguing over financial matters and other things more. And peer groups become family because family is busy working. And peer groups do drugs and party and get into minor trouble and then into major trouble because that’s the only excitement or challenge available in the environment. Or some peer groups think they can make it big hustling until another peer group or an adult gang decides that they are infringing on their turf and rough them up or blow them away and steal their drugs and their proceeds.
Note that I am describing the realities in a nice suburban rather diverse (for America) neighborhood. Add the chronic unemployment of a large proportions of black neighborhoods and you find parents spending hours and days waiting in lines at various social service agencies, kids in tow. You find aimless men with no hope left because of unemployment, jail records, and a chain of failed relationships standing on street corners, just staring or using what money the can scrounge to sit in the local tavern or bar talking to their buddies of similar circumstances. Or you see men and women with plastic bags, collecting cans from the streets for redemption for a little cash. And amid this all of the still struggling folks who can get jobs from time to time and mothers determined to get a better deal for their kids who are doing all the same things that those suburban families are doing under much more difficult circumstances.
Lets’s talk about those realities first because they are the cauldron that produces the sort of crime you think we need to talk about.
And let’s talk about the continuing folly of our urban police forces, who like our military tend to wind up attacking the people they are supposed to be protecting because they can’t sort out who’s the good guys and who’s the bad guys except from their mistaken profiling based on correlation without understanding. That results in police shooting a large number of young black men every year.
And let’s talk about the anger generated by stop-and-frisk and police harassment and police brutality. And the rough way that any and all people in custody are treated.
And let’s talk about police impunity in which a handcuffed detainee lying face down is killed by a policeman and the policeman walks.
Yes, BooMan, let’s have that conversation about why there are so many black kids killing other black kids and black men killing black women and black women killing white women.
Then let’s talk about the white crime rate in the South and Appalachia driven by a lot of the same economic realities,but without the overlay of racial discrimination but with the overlay of class discrimination. White on white violence is not insignificant in America.
Finally, let’s talk about the trend to privatization of community functions or the passing of the cost of community functions off to individuals. And the whole failure of the notion of community policing with armed individuals. And the whole notion that the only legitimate solution to these sorts of issues is tougher (more aggressive, more violent) policing. And the huge male anxiety that underlies that trend from the 1970s.
But let’s not overlook the growing gun sales as part of a movement that sees vigilantism as its only defense against the other. And those are the folks that will take glee, and judging from tweets already have taken glee in the acquittal of George Zimmerman. That might not be a big problem now, but it could very soon become one.
Fucking righteous.
I find myself unable to write anything better than this about Zimmerman’s trial.
From you, especially. Thank you.
Awesome words!
While we’re at it, let’s merely note that there is a great deal of economic and structural violence baked into our society – the sort of violence in which not a shot is fired, but in which real human lives are diminished and lost all the same. Want to really end the cycle of violence in this country? We’d have to pursue policies that would actually break that cycle of violence – a daunting task given that the measures needed would be far from politically correct from the point of view taken by our CEO class and those politicians and pundits who are doing their bidding.
Just my two cents.
with you especially on this, but the reason for it is conceptual – it’s very difficult to understand violence, for example, when our culture as a whole conceptualizes everything only in terms of individual actions. Compare Emile Durkheim for the opposite end of the spectrum. I don’t see anything good to link to for Durkheim, but briefly, Durkheim analyzed human beings as participants in a society that is more than simply an aggregate of individuals. the function of violence in a given society, according to Durkheim, cannot be analyzed simply as a product of individual motivations and actions. (he studied suicide as the presumably most “individual” of acts).
By the way, 1 out of every 14 people in Florida has a concealed carry permit. I wonder how many tourists are conscious of this fact, especially the ones who tend to drive aggressively.
The Zimmerman Affair now likely enters our catalogue of Famous Cases, and efforts will have to be expended to determine exactly why lightning stuck with this obscure FL murder and how it became a national event among the thousands and thousands of violent crimes committed each day.
It was a case at the intersection of two great political movements in America, circa 2013—the transformation of the country into NRA Nation via perversion of state gun laws all over the country and the increase in racial tension and prideful white racism that has obviously been the “conservative” white reaction to Obama’s election and re-election.
Both of these movements had well developed political sides already at each others throats. Indeed the Obama Haters felt compelled to drag Obama into the affair (on pretty slender evidence) to make the issue even clearer to the “conservative” troops. Add in the initial sweep-it-under-the-rug Keystone Kops buffoonery (and likely racism) of the crack Sanford constabulary and there’s a lot goin’ on here.
The case demonstrated what many feared was the case with all these new ALEC/NRA-backed dilutions of state gun law—that one could now shoot and kill someone with no accountability if they came up with (or simply made up) a plausible story. Here, “white” Zimmerman took way too personal a concern with this non-event (a black teen in “his” gated community), took his pre-loaded trusty gun ally to “investigate” the (non)event, ended up killing the black teen and then cried “self defense”, having conveniently killed the supposedly “aggressive” black victim. And it turns out the FL (gun) law is indeed heavily stacked against this being proved a crime.
The reality in NRA Nation now is that any demented fool or po-lice wannabe who wants to run around with a gun for imagined “self protection” or “neighborhood watch” can do so, and when one of these turds ends up killing someone based on his deranged perception of events, there’s an excellent chance (thanks to the NRA’s new shooting-friendly laws) that the killer won’t be punished, if he’s even charged. Especially if it’s a white person killing a black male.
Add in the “conservative”-approved Return of Proud and Open Racism and you have a recipe for more murder and injustice. And throughout Red America, that’s what they’re cheering about. Another little milestone on our highway to barbarism.
Yes, yes.
All true. But it’s important to recognize the fundamental connection between the two movement you refer to.
Each has a corporate element: Obama is mistrusted by plutocrats and financial types that believe in, and fear, the cartoon image of a “gift-giving” democrat whose “New Deal” policies will undo our fabled economic “strength,” and the NRA (at least since its takeover a couple decades ago) uses its membership as window-dressing for its gun-industry agenda.
But beyond that, they’re deeply connected in the conservative hindbrain along the armature of race. the gun issue is the race issue; they’re connected together at the root. A black president “who will take away our guns” is, for these people, a primal scare image so frightening that even college educated people who should know better have come completely unglued and are calling him “fascist” and “Hitler” and “Muslim” (i.e. belonging to the group that’s the “enemy of America”) and not even an American.
At least with Clinton, there were recognizable elements of scandal (albeit thin ones: “Whitewater,” Lewinsky etc.); with the squeaky-clean, University-professor, neoconservative Obama there’s a totally irrational terror and hatred that doesn’t connect to anything in the real world and doesn’t have to. The NRA and the anti-Obama “movements” are the same: they are the essence of the basic American conflict, which is about fear, hatred, and resentment of people of color. Since Nixon, and well before, our National identity is race and guns, guns and race. “Us” and “them,” and who’s going to kick in whose door first.
As an essentially optimistic, utopian, progressive white liberal, it pains me to hear myself saying something so extreme and incendiary and exaggerated (and pessimistic), but I can’t help myself. There’s no way around it. My eyes are open; that’s what I see.
And if a few smug, condescending progressive smarty-pants get in the way, well… Let God sort ’em out.
I started a reply.
It grew.
Now a stand-alone post.
Clockwork Orange America. Can We Stop It? Yes. Here’s How.
AG
Sometimes I wonder if you really have listened to the basic facts in this case.
Zimmerman, who had a history of run-ins with the law, and who creeped out the local neighborhood watch, stalked this boy, who was doing nothing but walking and talking on the phone.
Zimmerman was ordered by authorities in that moment to leave the kid alone and allow the police to come (thus the term “neighborhood watch” as opposed to “neighborhood vigilantes”)
Martin had every right to be in the neighborhood and was doing nothing wrong.
Zimmerman pursued the child anyway, and at the very least provoked some sort of confrontation.
Once Martin was dead, the local authorities failed to immediately arrest Zimmerman, compromising the entire investigation and making conviction more difficult. This most likely happened due to racial bias; I find it impossible to believe that if Trayvon had shot Zimmerman he wouldn’t have been immediately arrested.
Zimmerman has been caught in numerous lies during his defense and failed to take the stand. The prosecution, hobbled by what appears to me to be real reluctance in this case, also likely due to bias, did a lousy job.
The reason for violence in the black community is grinding poverty, racism, and lack of opportunity, period. You don’t have to look far to figure that out. To pretend that we should all have some sort of deep sympathy for the monstrous assumptions that resulted in this murderer getting of scot free is just bizarre.
Good grief, my previous boss was stopped several times a year by police driving to and from his neighborhood in North Minneapolis (a lower income neighborhood with a large AA population). Profiling him didn’t do a damned thing to keep that neighborhood safe. All it did was make him want to move out, and make that neighborhood worse off.
You might want to take another look at your understanding of the legal case. Jeralyn Merritt makes it all clear.
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Thoughtful piece, especially this quote …
The massive attention for this trial was counterproductive as there was no advance in the underlying issues. Does anyone have a link to the letter (thank-you note) writen by O’Mara to the Sanford Police Department. Just as GZ is acquitted, Sanford police investigators appear to have done an excellent job. IMO they failed!
And who wrote those laws? For what reasons? For that matter, is the law always enforced as it is written? When, and why is it not?
This is a lovely intellectual exercise, but meaningless. Some people are just evil. Zimmerman is quite clearly one of those people. I have little better to say for his “supporters”, either.
The biggest scandal in this country right now is the way we just accept, as not even being newsworthy, the day-after-day drumbeat of black kids dying in our streets.
see, everyone who makes this “point” (and they are legion) leaves out a rather prominent detail of the zimmerman case: they knew who the shooter was, and they didn’t question, let alone detain, him. This doesn’t happen every day in the chicago projects, race of the shooter notwithstanding. I wish people would cut this crap.
I don’t want to associate myself with people who dismiss the Zimmerman case because black kids are dying all the time and no one makes a big deal out of it.
I have been writing about the epidemic of gun violence in our cities ever since the Newtown massacre, specifically because it pisses me off the no one makes a deal about it.
All that is true, but don’t forget it happens to brown kids too. We have to be united.
Charles P. Pierce:
How’s the indefatigable Charlie Pierce’s foot feel buried ankle deep in that green ass?