By now, everyone and their brother has weighed in on the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman “incident” (or hate crime, depending on your perspective) and I wrote more than a couple articles about it all those months ago when it was just getting started. Since then, Zimmerman has been officially acquitted, the stand your ground law isn’t any more vulnerable than it was, and even Obama has said that it’s time to move on.
And yet I can’t help but feel that it is far from over, no matter how bad people might want it to be. George Zimmerman isn’t going away anytime soon (I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a show on Faux News sometime in the near future or, at the very least, a rightwing radio show in Topeka, Kansas perhaps called “Vigilante Justice…Against People Who Aren’t Doing Anything Wrong”). His case isn’t just a Casey Anthony-style tabloid sideshow that smacks of arm-chair luridness.
In a very real and very sad way, George Zimmerman is a symbol of the times we live in. If I had to write a character to explain our restless, paranoid times, I would be hard-pressed to come up with someone better than a desperate-for-action, trigger-happy neighborhood watchman. Zimmerman is a nobody that wants to be a somebody so badly, he creates his own action hero scenario.
He went out looking for trouble that night but somehow convinced others that he was trying to stop trouble. He’s a living, breathing symbol of an America that is spending itself broke (more than the next ten countries combined) on missile systems we don’t need and wars most of us don’t want to fight in. We’re also the gun-nut country despite our relative stability, and our “protective” guns are killing more of us than we’re saving. Doesn’t that sound a lot like a restless, violent neighborhood watchman who’s been arrested before for punching a cop?
Even more telling is the murky racialism that lurks at the heart of this case. It’s interesting that Zimmerman’s defenders keep insisting that this case isn’t about race…even as all of them are conservatives who always take the side that’s least friendly to black interests. If this really isn’t about race then what possible stake do conservatives have in defending a man like Zimmerman against a dead, unarmed black teenager? What’s in it for them? Nothing, unless they somehow know that their voters/listeners/party-members would see more than a little bit of themselves in a wannabe-cowboy who can’t fight a black teenager fairly, but can shoot him dead. It’s the same mentality that allows the police to kill with impunity, and our “justice” system to let a man like Zimmerman off while executing black men/women (like Troy Davis or Texas’s recent 500th prisoner) on circumstantial evidence at best. This isn’t about just one case that doesn’t work, it’s about a paranoid, “shoot first, reason later” mentality that’s gone too far from our justice system to our military policies.