I am going to put my last two cents about the George Zimmerman trial and then let it be, let it end, let it die.
The man is guilty. Second degree murder for sure because it was not planned, but he did it anyway.
Should he rot in prison for the rest of his life? Perhaps not, I am pretty sure he wasn’t intending on killing Trayvon Martin but he should spend a good period behind bars because he started the situation and ended it in a most awful way. To continue: He disobeyed the police when he made the call, he followed Martin, and he approached Martin. He instigated the entire situation. And when he was losing the fight, he decided to kill him. There were many different ways he could have approached the situation, and made one bad decision after another---leading to the death of a teenager holding skittles and iced tea.
If he had stayed in the car, excellent chance Martin would still be alive.
If he had simply approached Martin in a calm manner, this trial would have never happened.
If he had done only the extent of his duty as opposed to becoming a Batman, the cops would have handled the situation…and arguably much better.
If he didn’t want to kill him, he would not have shot him in the chest. Plain and simple. This would have been my main argument.
What absolutely cluttered and damaged this trial however were all the little controversies surrounding it, making this trial a hotbed for conversation. Race, gun control, self-defense, police involvement, and even to an extent social class was brought into the conversation. It absolutely clouded the main fact that a man with a chip on his shoulder took the law to his own hands and did what he did---and to this day I still don’t see much remorse in his eyes. And yes, race did indeed play a part of it because of the racial profiling.
The cluttering began with the rather slow arresting of Zimmerman in the first place. There was a dead boy on Zimmerman’s watch and the only reason the process to arrest him happened was because of the major social outcry. Race became the issue because questions started ringing in everyone’s heads: why did it take so long? If it were a black man killing a white man would the arrest have come quicker? So with that, race became the big issue, and there were opponents from all over. Race was indeed a reason why it all happened, but turning Martin into a potential martyr for the Black community may have deterred the jury a little. 5 white women being in the jury didn’t help make things any easier either……
The gun control issue came up, and this was a non-issue plain and simple. The gun wasn’t the issue, the violence that followed became the problem. We don’t see the gun issue going up when the gangs are shooting each other here in Orlando, Miami, and other parts of the country. The gun debate happened only when a high-profile case was brought to our attention.
The Stand Your Ground law was the other big issue, which ironically is a law that was meant to protect people like Trayvon Martin, who was a person being threatened that night when he was being pursued and followed. The law is still very vague and confusing—because technically anyone can take out anyone if they feel the slightest bit of a threat. With the right lawyer and the right smile, you can quite literally get away with murder. And now with an unarmed boy being perceived as enough of a threat for this law to stand and help Zimmerman win, it really opens up some ugly doors.
What the Trayvon Martin case did to Florida was open up an ugly history that occurred in the Post-Reconstruction era. Northern Central Florida had many clashes between blacks and whites in the 1900s, and one of them actually resulted in an area becoming a haunting ghost town---see Rosewood. While Florida doesn’t have the uglier reputation of the other Dixie states in terms of this, it unfortunately still happens within the Sunshine State borders—although from Central to South Florida it’s not as dominant an issue.
The Trayvon Martin investigation was pretty much the breaking point in one of the nation’s larger problems in recent years. The country’s true racist colors started rising after (Yes, this is going to be said) Obama became president. Yes most states were fine with this major change as the black sheep (pun intended) in the entourage of presidents in all of history, but there were some spots in the nation that got very ugly seeing him in the White House. And with this, whether it’s the increasing exposure and/or increasing technology, it seems like racism has been on the upswing in recent years, and Treyvon seems to have become the breaking point.
And if you need reminders, there’s the Cheerios commercial, the Islam mosque controversy, the Gainesville Koran burning, what happened after the Hunger Games minor character turned out to be black, everything happening in Arizona, the Immigration issue, the anti-Black statements made by Boston fans towards a hockey player two years ago, the Paula Deen controversy, and that’s just the beginning. Yes, I am extremely aware that it is usually a few punks making us look bad, but with the quiet rise of the KKK among other hate groups, a lot of racism has been brewing in the waters in recent years. And I have not mentioned the sudden rise of the Confederate flag….including a huge one that you can see on the I-4 West/I-95 junction.
You know this is in the back of most of our minds when we waited between the end of February and APRIL while waiting for the arrest of Zimmerman.
I think I should wrap this up so I can try to put this sad story behind me. Basically, man sees black kid, assumes he is up to no good, stalks him, approaches him, starts losing the fight, pulls out gun and shoots him on the chest.
Prosecution fails to display just how there were many ways to handle the situation that would not have led to a death---they honestly did, even if the facts pointed more towards Zimmerman instigating the situation.
Zimmerman is free. He should be allowed to live in peace because we had our chance to convict him, and failed to do so.
Time to try to move on.
Sorry Martin family. May your son rest in peace.
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