Here in Central Texas, on a military post, I didn't expect to find a lot of agreement with my views on the Trayvon Martin case. So far I haven't really been surprised. What has knocked me off a balance is how little attention is paid to the events that led up to the shooting, and George Zimmerman's accountability for them. That George Zimmerman was perfectly within his rights is all over talk radio, and spilling out of the mouths of my colleagues at work. Self defense has become the knee jerk catchphrase when this topic comes up. There are issues of race, gun rights, the role of citizen watch groups, and a host of other matters that need to be discussed in the context of this tragedy. To say the least, we're a country have some figuring out to do.
That's not why I'm writing this diary today. You see, here in conservative country there's another knee jerk word that gets tossed around: responsibility. If a your car breaks down, you didn't check the oil. If you're poor, you didn't make the right educational choices. If you're overweight, you didn't watch what you ate. The crux of the responsibility argument is that the vast majority of circumstances that individuals finds themselves in result from choices that were made by that individual.
Personal responsibility is a flagship ideal of the right, so why is it so conspicuously missing in Florida? An adult, who chose to own a handgun, chose to participate in the neighborhood watch, and who chose to pursue someone he found "suspicious" gets into a scuffle and kills a 17 year old kid coming back from the corner store. All anyone can do is talk about how he was within his rights according to Florida's stand your ground law. I haven't heard a Zimmerman defender who was willing to assert that Zimmerman's overall conduct was moral or right, only that in the seconds when Trayvon Martin was killed, he was within his right to self defense.
To my mind, this is a pretty simple matter. If you create a situation and it goes haywire, that's on you buddy. There was nothing inevitable about this, I think it's a safe bet that Trayvon Martin was not on his way to or from committing some crime. George Zimmerman brought this whole catastrophe into being through his choices and actions. Maybe he didn't set out to kill Trayvon Martin. Maybe he was just a guy who bought a gun and the Deathwish boxed set and got in way over his head. The bottom line here, and what gets to me the most, is that a dumb ass with a gun made choices that resulted in an innocent kid paying for them with his life.
Even if George Zimmerman isn't convicted of anything, to absolve him of any and all responsibility in this is repulsive. Worse, to even imply that the man is some kind of hero or victim is beyond words. This isn't about guilt, or blame, this is about being held accountable for the effects of what a person's done. This is about not being able to shrug off the death of a child with an "oops, my bad".
