Because You Needed Another Opinion

I am so sick of the Trayvon Martin debate that I am now choosing to join in on it myself. This continues a trend of entries that I write because I’d rather write an entry here than discuss any issue on Facebook. You Open Diarists are so much more respectable.

Anyway, back to the issue at hand, I’ve mostly been struck by the fact that many people seem incapable of having any sort of nuanced opinion on the Trayvon Martin shooting. At the very least, most people who feel the need to spout off on the matter are either blindly in favor or Trayvon or blindly in favor of Zimmerman. Perhaps those who are silent are silent because they understand the issue is nuanced, but unfortunately I hear nothing from them.

Personally, I think that Trayvon Martin did not deserve to die and that George Zimmerman does not deserve to be convicted of murder. I don’t think that these are mutually exclusive things. Honestly I am somewhat sympathetic to both parties.

Ok, from Martin’s perspective, he is being harassed by some guy that he doesn’t know when he may have just been innocently wandering around the neighborhood. The guy pisses him off and he gets angry and starts swinging on him. Not the brightest decision necessarily, but I imagine a lot of 17-year old males are going to have that reaction. If every 17-year old who got pissed and decided to take a swing at someone deserved to get shot, then I myself would be among the dead.

From Zimmerman’s perspective, he is living in a neighborhood that has had multiple break-ins and he notices someone wandering around the neighborhood in a manner that he perceived to be suspicious. He confronts the person and gets attacked. Being attacked and knowing that he has a gun, he is fearful that his life could be in danger and he thus shoots the person attacking him. As someone who has been suddenly attacked by an irrational person before, I can also relate to being fearful and taking a sudden action. If I had a gun when Evan was beating me up, I might have shot him.

So to me it just seems like a bad situation where both parties acted stupidly. Zimmerman never should have confronted Martin, Martin never should have attacked Zimmerman. In a world where Casey Anthony was acquitted, I don’t know how you can reasonably convict George Zimmerman of murder, though I could certainly understand convicting him of a lesser crime. And that should be the end of the story.

What I’ve found most distasteful about the whole affair is how hungry the media has been to turn the event into a racial issue. The fact that Zimmerman said something unintelligible in a phone call and media outlets attempted to interpret his unintelligible murmur into racial slur is completely ridiculous and why it’s so hard to respect the media sometimes.  

Anyway, my end thoughts are that it was an unfortunate event that shouldn’t stand for anything more than a bad situation that happened between two people. That our society has twisted it to be representative of something more is misguided.