My problem with answering the poll
I never was able to answer the poll, and it kind of lingered in the back of my mind. I have read CAF threads, news articles and the comments, and threads on other forums. I think I have been exposed to information and opinions from a lot of different sides.
And this is my conclusion: the problem with this case is that it is presented as needing a bad guy.
This is a very American thing to do, btw. If a problem occurs, we want answers, we want to assign blame, we want to keep it from happening again or at least find out how to avoid its happening to us.
To simply say that something was the result of accident, not the fault of any particular person, etc., is not reassuring to us and doesn’t fit our national psyche.
In this case, if Zimmerman is found guilty, then he will be the bad guy, and Martin will be the good-guy victim of a bad guy.
Conversely, if Zimmerman is found not guilty, then Martin will be the bad guy, and Zimmerman the good-guy victim.
Think about it… isn’t that what you have seen in people’s comments?
There are those who are somewhat remote from the people involved who take a more logistical view, like chess players, but they are not whom I am talking about.
What I would like to suggest is that *they can both be good guys. *
Yes, I think that this could be a simple matter of two people wandering around in the dark and rainy night, each with no thought of doing anything wrong, but in ignorance of the other’s motives, reacting in a dangerous way.
Let’s look at Trayvon Martin. He is a kid walking home from the store in the rain, talking on a headset telephone. He’s not paying a lot of attention to what’s going on around him, he’s wandering, occasionally ducking under shelter.
He sees a man in a truck watching him. This makes him nervous. He walks towards the truck to see if the man will ask for directions or anything like that, but he doesn’t. In fact, the man looks scary, serious, angry, as he talks on his phone and stares at Trayvon.
Trayvon decides this guy is too creepy and takes off for home. He hears the man get out of his truck and runs to hide. He think he might not want to go home because the man might follow him there and put his family in danger, or maybe he just gets muddled with all the similar-looking sections of buildings.
In the meantime, we have George Zimmerman, a man with a strong urge to help people. The last time he called about someone he had seen, the dispatcher had asked him, after the stranger he was reporting had disappeared, if Zimmerman could, in Zimmerman’s words, “get to where he could see.”
So this time, Zimmerman is not trying necessarily to follow, but to see where to point the police, to “get to where he could see.”
And on his search, Zimmerman somehow startles or is mistaken for seeing Martin, who is hiding. Martin therefore comes out and confronts Zimmerman, who reaches to get his cell phone.
Martin sees that motion and thinks that Zimmerman is reaching for a gun, so he hits Zimmerman and tries to scare him as he hits him.
Zimmerman fears for his life and actually reaches for his gun, with the very sad results.
So, do you see how this could have happened with *neither *of them being a bad guy? How this could have simply been a horrific series of misperceptions and fear-generated decisions?
I truly believe that if we were not looking at this case in a dichotomous way, if we just tried to put ourselves in *both * men’s shoes and tried to understand better *what happened *rather than *who’s at fault, *that we could come to a better place both in this case and in this nation.
But division and fear-mongering on both sides is instead leading us to a worse place.
