YOUR HIGHER MORALITY

[fpb]

Well, I suppose all my friends are right. We do need Zimmerman lynched. We are in need of a lynch mob unleashed by short and fraudulent media summaries to rip a man who has been judged innocent by a jury of his peers and hang him on a tree on the reports of MNBC and the rest. Because journalists never would lie and always understand everything that is going on, and are in fact fountains of virtue and sagacity, and we may confidently hate those whom they tell us to hate; whereas the jury that has spent weeks being exposed in detail to everything that could be retrieved of the facts are too stupid, ignorant and racist to make the right choice. We need more demos. We need more shouting. We need more threats.

Comments

[ravenclaw-eric.livejournal.com]

A big, big part of the problem with this whole situation is that the mainstream media here in the US is heavily, overwhelmingly, dominated by one point-of-view...and is permanently mentally stuck in a time warp where every confrontation or disagreement between blacks and whites is the Bridge at Selma. To them, blacks are wronged innocents, and if a black is in the wrong, you refer back to the previous rule and do all you can to suppress the inconvenient truth.

They were careful to run, at first, only a picture of Martin that had been taken several years before his death, and made him look angelic, while the picture of Zimmerman they used did not, to say the least, show him at his best. Unfortunately for their preferred narrative, the more facts came out, the less Zimmerman looked like the second coming of Bull Connor, and the more of a hoodlum Martin turned out to be.

This apple-cheeked lad had been in that neighborhood in the first place because he'd become a discipline problem at his school---as in caught with burglary tools and women's jewelry for which he had no explanation. Unfortunately (for Martin) the school was under heavy pressure to bring down the numbers of its black male students who were leaving the place in handcuffs, so he was merely sent to live with his father.

Also, Martin's social-media entries came to light, and were soon to be seen all over the internet, and the more of them that appeared, the more of a gangsta-wannabe (at the very, very least) he looked like.

Zimmerman almost certainly wouldn't have been charged but for fear of riots, thanks to the professional demagogues who are seen as "leaders of the black community." Even if I thought he was as dirty as hell and deserved to fry, I'd rejoice at his acquittal, merely because I detest the sight of juries and courts being swayed by threats of mob violence.

And, ironically enough, Zimmerman himself was, at least before all this hoo-rah, almost a caricature of an Obama voter. He'd held the local cops' feet to the fire some years previous over their treatment of a homeless black man, he'd helped tutor black students, he was a good liberal...until Obama had to throw him under the bus to please the race rabble-rousers.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I heard everything you mention. Actually, I have a suspicion that the local police, thought they knew perfectly well that Zimmerman was no more guilty than the man in the moon, may well have been pleased to help the prosecutors because they remembered him from when he had taken a very vocal part in the campaign that had forced a previous police head to resign, only a year before.

[ravenclaw-eric.livejournal.com]

That makes the whole thing stink even more.

If this goes on, I might as well move to the Norfolk Fens.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Don't bother. The British police is as corrupt and the PC instinct even more primary.

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

The original local police on the case (the detectives and the chief) didn't believe there was anything to arrest Zimmerman for, according to various accounts that came to light during the trial. It wasn't until sociopolitical pressure was brought to bear - and new personnel were brought in on the case - that he was arrested and prosecuted. Most legal analysts have expressed the opinion that murder charges were almost certainly never going to be made to stick, a notion reinforced by the last-minute decision to tell the jury that manslaughter could also be considered. By trial's end, I wager, it was too late for that. The state blew its wad on second-degree murder, and even they figure the odds were strong it was a loser. I truly believe they always knew but felt that had to "do" something.

The United States of America is deeply fractured. It doesn't help that it, with the willing and eager help of the Democratic and Republican parties and the press, is addicted to outrage orgasms. There are a large number of people, white and non-white, that want Zimmerman made an example of, for him to be punished not only for his crime but also for the crimes of others they believe, rightly or wrongly, "got away with it." And there are a large number of people, mostly white, who are actually happy that Trayvon Martin is dead and violently because of what they feel he represented: a young black male criminal-in-training. I've not only read posts and essays by members of both groups. I've listened to them in conversation. I've not had one with any of them because, frankly, there is no such thing allowed. Either "Zimmerman is a hateful, racist monster who got away with murdering an child" or "Martin, that little thug-wannabe who was probably going to be living off the taxpayer dime in prison in a few years anyway, deserved that bullet." And a lot of people speak of it all as if they wish that either they could throw the switch on Zimmerman or could have shot Martin themselves. It's not going to get any better any time soon, I fear.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

My own experience of having the Politically Correct hounds of Hell unleashed against me by people in power (specifically, university authorities) leads me to feel strong sympathy with Zimmerman, who has done nothing wrong that I can see. Of course, being no fan of gun nuts and lynch mobs, I am not going to jump up and down at the waste of a life that began long before Martin ran into that bullet. I hate the thought of - as Dickens wonderfully put it - "...children...generated in great numbers for certain destruction... imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged... so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,—to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow," (Great Expectations, ch.51)

[jsl32.livejournal.com]

Zimmerman was a sweet (black) man (if my own children are black, which they are) who cared about his community and his neighbors greatly and ended up fearing for his life one night and made a moment's decision to save his own life.

Martin was a silly young man who might have grown out of his stupidity, but we'll never know, because he had to face the consequences for it in a very direct way.

That is what I see in the evidence available to us non-jury members and it's greatly distressing to me that black people didn't get behind the other black guy in that fight.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Well, I hope some do... If you look at the company any real protester would find himself in, perhaps that would be enough to make them think again. The latest news is that "protesters" either have looted or are trying to loot a Wal-Mart. Interesting way to protest, that.