I’ll keep this short, because there’s stuff to do. My advice to anyone who wants to kill someone (non-white) with impunity is simply to follow these three steps:

1. Invite said person down to Florida
2. Take them somewhere where no one can observe you closely, perhaps the Everglades, and shoot them dead
3. Claim they made you feel threatened, thereby invoking  the “Stand Your Ground” law (signed by noted moderate Jeb Bush)

That’s pretty much all you need to know. Watching the Zimmerman trial, I can’t help but feel like he’s going to walk through that massive legal hole opened for him by bullet-brained state legislators (fueled by ALEC) and Big Jeb. I am struck by that sense, and by the overwhelming irony of the defense’s efforts to frame Zimmerman as the target of racial profiling. Cross examination of Trayvon Martin’s friend Rachel Jeantel was ludicrous. The girl did not want to be there, but felt she had to. She lost her friend, and she was herself being stereotyped on the stand. The insinuation that her use of a very standardized form of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) was just bad speech, uneducated muttering, etc., was quite simply racist. Watching the defense attorney, surrounded by white people, disrespecting this young lady was truly nauseating.

Regardless, though the Zimmerman defense team seems less than stellar, their fight is downhill all the way. All they need to do is sow doubt. It’s Zimmerman’s word against the silence of a dead young man. Seems like there was a time when a jury might take one look at this 200-plus pound vigilante, look at the slight kid he shot, and toss him in the slammer.  That time, if it ever existed, was before “Stand Your Ground”. (I’m not certain it ever existed when the young man was black and the shooter white, particularly in a place like Florida. )

Color me disgusted. On a week when they’ve gutted the voting rights act, it’s appropriate that we should be reminded of our deep cultural racism.

luv u,

jp