If anything good is to come from the Zimmerman verdict, it will require sober self-assessment by all of us about how we treat each other in this county. I've read the extreme, vitriolic comments on other sites, and it depressed me. So I came here, thinking my liberal buds would be different. Oh, well.
Look, its possible to hold two (or more) conflicting thoughts in one's head at the same time. Could BOTH Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman have handled things better, made better choices -- YES. Where they both "at fault" at some level for what happened? YES. (I'm NOT saying by any stretch of the imagination that Martin "deserved" to die. He did NOT.)
Zimmerman could have avoided the whole thing by getting into his car and waiting for the police to arrive. Martin could have gone home or gone to a neighbor and (don't laugh) called the police to report a strange guy following him. Zimmerman could have left the gun in his car, or not had one in the first place. Martin didn't have to straddle Zimmerman and knock his head into the concrete.
Whether Zimmerman was liable criminally for shooting and killing Martin is one issue. A very narrow issue set out in the jury instructions. An issue that has been decided by a jury that took 16 hours going over the evidence. Nobody here did that.
The jury said "not guilty." That's all the jury said. They didn't say innocent. They didn't say whether the state failed to prove the elements of the crimes or whether the state failed to negate the defense of self-defense.
The other issue is harder. Its why? Why were Zimmerman and Martin suspicious of each other? (Zimmerman called the cops on Martin; Martin decided to physically strike Zimmerman) Is there a reason other than race? Is race just one of the reasons? Does that distinction matter?
Our schools may be desegregated, but many of us don't live desegregated lives. Let's face it, we (many of us) associate "with our own kind" without consciously thinking about it. "I have a friend who is -- fill in the blank --" is as far as many of us get.
Bashing the media is OK, they deserve it, they've certainly played their usual part in ratcheting up everyone's emotions, often without first bothering to report the facts accurately. But come on, they mostly just reinforce our pre-existing biases.
Its up to us, all of us, to work on this as a country. I've got a challenge to all the parents out there, especially of younger children: Do something concrete to encourage your children to have friends of different races. Schedule the play dates. Invite the parents over to your home for dinner. Play a sport where the teams aren't dominated by kids of only one race. Racism & prejudices (all kinds) are learned behaviors; we need to unlearn them. When they read books, broaden their horizons by encouraging them to read biographies of people of a race different than yours, from countries of origin different than yours, etc.
Trayvon Martin had every right to go out in the middle of the night for a snack. He should have been able to safely return home.
Threatening Zimmerman in any way is not going to help the Martin family, nor is it going to help in understanding and solving the problem.
But it sure is easy to do only that, isn't it?