On Trayvon Martin… When Will It End
I’m a white woman from a small town in Massachusetts, but I spent 19 years living in Los Angeles. I raised my only child, my white daughter in inner city L.A. schools where she was a minority. Many of her school friends were black, many of my friends in L.A. are black with black sons, and every time I read another piece on Trayvon Martin, my heart breaks a little more.
We lived in L.A. during the Rodney King riots… I’ve seen up close and personal the way black men were targeted in the inner city by white cops. I abhore racism. I abhore gun violence. And I abhore laws that allow guns in the hands of the wrong people. I get the whole 2nd amendment argument, but I don’t get organizations pushing laws like Stand Your Ground, in states like Florida and other states pushing for similar legislation. Where does it stop?
Charles Pierce said in Esquire:
We executed children in this country until long after the rest of the world — except Iran — thought that was a good idea. Almost six million children live in poverty in this country. Almost six million of them are without health insurance of any kind, and that’s reckoned to be an improvement. None of this is accidental. These children are expendable because the people we elect make policy decisions of which we approve — or, at least, of which we do not disapprove. The Republicans in Congress — behind the “leadership” of zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan — would like to zero out the SCHIP children’s health-care program. If they do that, it will not be done by accident. The Florida legislature, behind the leadership of the National Rifle Association, passed the “stand your ground” law, despite the fact that even police and prosecutors were warning that it amounted to a hunting license for anyone who had both a gun, and the ability to concoct a good story. Trayvon Martin is not dead by accident.
Charles Pierce is right, “Trayvon Martin is not dead by accident,” and by now everyone should know that. The outrage that Zimmerman has not been charged with a crime is beyond palable, yet we wait to see if he will be charged. And in the meantime so many of us feel the pain, the frustration, the heart break and the sick feeling in our guts that things are so dreafully wrong in our country:
I am sick to death of people who celebrate “the family” making excuses about why other people’s children are expendable. I am sick to death of politicians who are more concerned about protecting zygotes than about the teenagers on whom they seek to balance their budgets and advance their careers. (Barney Frank’s line about conservatives’s believing that life “begins at conception and ends at birth” was not entirely a joke, although it’s always been treated as one.) I am sick to death of opportunistic yahoos who can look at this country’s unhealthy attachment to firearms and declare that the actions of George Zimmerman, while unfortunate, were pretty much what the Founders had in mind. I am sick to death of the steady drip-drip-drip of all the topical anesthetics we mix up whenever something like this happens. Had Emmett Till been killed in 2012, there’d be at least three people sitting in the CNN Green Room right now — and probably 15 of them sitting offstage at Fox — waiting to explain how unfortunate it was that the lad so transgressed against local custom that circumstances dictated that he be beaten to a pulp and tossed into the river tied to a cotton-gin fan. I am sick to death about how we can argue about anything simply to argue about it, and then move along to the next argument, as though anything at all has been settled.
Trayvon’s tragic death has become a political football in the midst of election season that clearly draws lines in the sand showing the racial discord in America. Our President speaks out and says, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” and shortly after, Republican Newt Gingrich is verbally assaulting Obama calling his comments “disgraceful.”
Disgraceful? What is “disgraceful,” is Newt Gingrich’s lack of respect, respect for our president and respect for Trayvon’s family.
I am sick to death, as Charles Pierce is, that this country does nothing but argue and those agruments somehow lead to the death of innocent children.
When will it end.