This post is a followup to a recent post published in Patch.
Sunday, my friend, Greg, a retired Prosecutor, asked me if I was surprised by the verdict in the Trayvon Martin death by gunshot.
I said "yes" - I had thought George Zimmerman would at minimum have gotten some 'slap on the wrist' punishment. After all, he'd killed an unarmed person who, it turned out, was minding his own business.
I asked Greg the same question back - was he surprised? "Not at all", he said. He lived a career with the reality that prosecutors face every day in our system: the issue of proof "beyond reasonable doubt".
Personally, I think there is some glimmer of hope beyond the very dark cloud of what was a legal murder of an innocent teenager in Florida 16 months ago.
We are a TV 'soundbite' nation where news comes our ways in those annoying crawlers on the TV screen or equivalent; or in very short snippets of news reports repeated over and over and over. Or Twitter feeds....
This blog, at this point about 200 words, is too long for most citizens.
You've come this far: give me 400 more words of your time.
1. We'll likely never know how Mr. Zimmerman really feels now, many months after he chose to pull his weapon and, it turns out legally, at least in Florida, kill Trayvon Martin.
Without the "security" of that weapon, that night, he probably wouldn't have engaged Martin; or if he did, the result at worst would have been what usually happens in a normal fight.
All the gun accomplished was to destroy two lives: the young man who was killed that night; and the successful (and legal) perpetrator who will now be used for awhile by those who feel he's helped their cause; but who inevitably will be discarded by them for some new hero.
But anonymous no more.
I do wonder how he really feels...we'll likely never know.
2. There is an opportunity presented, here, for a deep national conversation, person-to-person, town-by-town, for instance:
Is Florida a safer place because of the gun laws that spawned the Trayvon Martin killing? Will the incident encourage people to move to Florida?
Is the marketing of fear that increases gun sales solely a benefit to the gun industry? After all, it is hard to imagine that vigilante gun owners will be much encouraged by the very real life sentence given Mr. Zimmerman in the wake of the incident in Sanford FL. He is free, but how free is he, really?
Will this tragic incident encourage more talk about the down-side of increasing attempts to increase "states" and "individual" "rights" as opposed to acknowledging the positive role of a responsible (and responsive) federal government and citizens who are at least as aware of their responsibility to society at large as to their rights as individuals?
We like to pretend we don't need government: that government gets in the way, particularly the farther away that government is.
Is this so?
Recently I did a 850 mile roundtrip to reunion places I was visiting in North Dakota. In my blog piece about the trip I chose to focus on Interstate 94, which began construction the very year I started college in 1958.
We Americans almost live on highways.
In my trip I traveled:
550 miles on Interstate 94, the granddaddy of Federal projects
154 miles on U.S. highways 52 and 281
140 miles on N.D. and MN State Highways
and a tiny handful of miles on county roads and city streets.
You can guess which roads were least desirable: those closest to individual control. There's reason I chose the Federal highways whenever possible.
I don't need to explain any more. Our greatness is as a United States, not not as a nation of individuals....
