Florida v. George Zimmerman

The Jury has reached a verdict in the case of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin. A lot will be heard of about how unfair the verdict was, and that we are allowing racism to run rampant in this country. Since I didn’t hear all the testimony, and the information that I have has been colored by the news media, I have to defer to the jury’s opinion. I trust that they will be able to live with their decision. Whether that decision was absolutely correct, or was influenced by all the publicity, or botched by incompetence of the prosecution is something that I’m sure will be endlessly debated in the media and on line for months. But the verdict is in and we must accept it.

My take on what happened is that two people saw something that, in each of their views of the world, alarmed them, and they reacted to an imagined threat. Fear overruled common sense, and the outcome was unfortunate in the extreme. My heart goes out to the Martin family for their great loss. 

The only silver lining in this is that it makes us reexamine our own reactions to someone who is different than us. Why, in a mixed race neighborhood, (or anywhere) would a black teenager walking home be viewed as anything out of the ordinary? I can see that, in spite of the vast strides we have made since the 60s, our perceptions of other people are still colored by appearance. Some of that is fed to us by the media. How many more times have you heard “the suspect is a black/hispanic/Muslim etc.” than “the suspect was a white/Protestant”. 

After the Oklahoma City bombing I never once heard any mention of Timothy McVey’s religion. There were certainly no threatened or actual burnings of Methodist churches, like there were of mosques after 9-11. After all it is more dramatic if the villain is a ......... (Insert race/gender/age/religion/sexual preference here) than a clean cut well dressed person of our race/gender/age/religion /sexual preference. So we are trained to equate different race/gender/age/religion /sexual preferences with villainy, and therefore all ......... are suspect. It is that perception that we have to overcome. 

It has been 50 years since we struck down  “separate but equal” and got rid of “No Colored Allowed”, or “Back of the bus”. It’s high time we stopped judging people by appearance and started using the same value system for everyone, regardless of race/gender/age/religion /sexual preference.

We need to examine our own feelings. Do we somehow fear the unknown or different? If we were walking along a dark street and came up on another person or someone was walking behind us, would our perception of what we see, or imagine, color our emotional response to the situation? Of course it would. It’s only human nature. The important thing is to temper our reactions. If the threat is only in our perception, then leave it there, perhaps some caution is in order, but don’t let our imagination place us in a situation where we overreact and harm ourselves or someone else.

I’m reminded of the song in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught”.

You've got to be taught To hate and fear You've got to be taught From year to Year It's got to be drummed  in your dear little ear You've got to be carefully taught You've got to be taught To be Afraid Of people whose eyes  are oddly made And people whose skin Is a different shade You've got to be carefully taught You've got to be taught Before it's too late Before you are 6 or 7 or 8  To hate all the people  your relatives hate You've got to be carefully taught

Well, I propose that we can be untaught hate and fear, and to embrace all people as equals and judge everyone as an individual. 

Let us make this Trayvon’s legacy, that we overcame our prejudices and began accepting everyone as valuable human beings, regardless of race/gender/age/religion/sexual preference, and embrace those differences, for adding spice to our lives, instead of being a threat.