Death of the Gated Community
--Haves and Havenots,
Arend van Dam
Arend van Dam
Hickory Dickory Dock,
The mouse ran up the clock.
The clock struck ten,
The mouse came again
--Hickory Dickory Dock, Nursery rhyme
Self-Defense is not murder
--Sleeping with the Enemy (1991)
In 1988, the crime rate in the United States rises four hundred percent.
The once great city of New York becomes the one maximum security prison
for the entire country.
. . .
The mouse ran up the clock.
The clock struck ten,
The mouse came again
--Hickory Dickory Dock, Nursery rhyme
Self-Defense is not murder
--Sleeping with the Enemy (1991)
In 1988, the crime rate in the United States rises four hundred percent.
The once great city of New York becomes the one maximum security prison
for the entire country.
. . .
The United States Police Force, like an
army,
is encamped around the island. There are no guards inside the prison,
only prisoners and the worlds they have made.
The rules are simple: once you go in, you don't come out.
--Escape from New York (1981)
______________________
is encamped around the island. There are no guards inside the prison,
only prisoners and the worlds they have made.
The rules are simple: once you go in, you don't come out.
--Escape from New York (1981)
______________________
Its summertime, and that means the news cycle is hungry for more of the crazy in Florida; we do not disappoint.
This summer will see the latest recrudescence of the 26 February 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman as jury selection is underway for Zimmerman's 2nd degree murder trial. We will not discuss the excellence or degeneracy of either the shooter or the victim.
As we have written before, it a sad story oft-repeated, young black male with a brief history of flirting with the wrong side of the law, killed before be could manifest whatever it was he would mature into, usually killed by another of his own race. There is little to make this story any more noteworthy than the too-many other daily iterations of Martin's death, but the name and nationality of the shooter caught the eye of some crime reporter scouring the police blotter.
What a bombshell this might have been: Jewish man (=Zimmerman) shoots black teen (Are Jews armed? Don't they volunteer for the ACLU getting blacks their rights?) A sociological truism is that the underdog who is assisted will one day turn against his champions (=perceived betters), and people like Louis Farrakhan made sure no love was lost between the black and Jewish communities. But shooting? Surely Jewish people do not go shooting up blacks for racist reasons. This would have indeed been a coup for some gun-jumping journo, but it was not to be.
Turns out the shooter is Hispanic, and had volunteered time tutoring young black youths in his gated community of The Retreat at Twin Lakes in Sanford, Florida, described as "a multi-ethnic" gated community. The Zimmermans had lived there since 2009, and Mr. Zimmerman was the community watch captain. So we do not have a rogue Jewish shooter, nor do we have a version of the Crips and the Bloods.
Now, since it is not a rare occurrence for a young black man to be shot by a police officer or a peer, why the outrage surrounding the death of Trayvon Martin? Perhaps the story has become one of place, rather than players. Perhaps this story actually marks the death of the gated community, once the last refuge of affluent whites seeking protection from the ravages that play out daily in the inner cities of our country.
This story has touched a nerve: does it signal the end of the line for "White Flight"? Where do the whites go now that the last bastion of "whitehood" has been breached? The gated community is no longer a white haven, and is patrolled by Hispanic volunteers who will confront the perceived interlopers.
The sanctity of the gated community has been corrupted and penetrated from within by a degraded economy which does not discriminate when taking its victims down. Gated communities are no longer guaranteed havens or retreats from the ills that plague this world, for the residents have all been jostled about by the vagaries of an unstable world.
The Retreat at Twin Lakes in Sanford, Florida -- the now multi-ethnic gated community -- is no longer a place of retreat. It is just another community of striving individuals who do not care to look out of their windows when they hear a scuffle or a gunshot. The losers are the people who used to believe that gates could protect them.
26 Feb 2012: R.I.P., Gated Communities. Your death was slow but inexorable; you, the victim of a tanked economy and an ever-multi-culturing society. Whether you will be missed, and/or replaced, remains to be seen.
Labels: gated communities, george Zimmerman, trayvon martin
posted by rangeragainstwar at 1:32 PM
34 Comments:
The middle class gated community is dead, of course. But there are still gated communities which are exclusive whites-only preserves of privilege. They simply are far upscale to the one where that Martin and Zimmerman played out their roles, and have armed guards at the entryways who do not open the gates until verifying with the homeowner that the non-limousine-driving riff-raff is their guest. Trayvon Martin would have never gotten past the gates at such a place unless in the back seat of a limousine, the guards would have turned him away. And Zimmerman too, for that matter.
It was always an illusion anyhow, that whitebread America could keep out the darkies by the mere expedient of erecting gates. The reality is that true exclusivity has always been reserved only for those of money and power, and the middle-class gated community was a scam from day one.
BT, The "darkies" have their own gated communities which also have armed guards at the entryways who do not open the gates. These communities are called prisons.. . Keep 'em out keep or 'em in.....just keep 'em away!
150 years and little has changed.
BT,
And of course, you're correct. The "death" is only for the ersatz "safe" communities; the real ones, with six-figure+ homes, are still safe.
Our local Vo-Tech is one of the gated casualties: its guard house sits empty and shuttered, weeds grow in the traffic calming areas.
I guess people will be less calm now.
Yep, what BadTux said.
What is dying is the illusion that the white middle and lower classes had that the "rising tide would rise all boats", that the people who shot strikers and evicted their widows and orphans back in the Gilded Age would have changed since then, that the fear of the Negro after the end of legal American apartheid would cause their Masters to close ranks with them against the scary darkies.
Instead they - the Zimmermans and their ilk - are finding that those overlords are leaving them to their McJobs and the rising debt that threatens to sink their saggy little liferafts; that the "distance" they thought they had from the dusky savages can be so easily breached that you might find yourself face-to-face with one of these behoodied beasts with nothing more than a hogleg for protection...
As far as this Return of the Trayvon thing, ISTM that the whole cachet of the Zimmerman-Martin story is the familiarity of it; a white (white-ish) guy finds the need to kill a dark (dark-ish) guy to "defend" himself, or his home, or the purity of his women.
Lynching. "Sunset laws". Jim Crow. Call it what you want, it's the same-old, same-old. It's never really changed, and based on the way we act we - most of us - don't care if it ever does. It's just that we hate to be reminded of it and so it makes news when we are...
Chief says the story is a familiar one,
a white (white-ish) guy finds the need to kill a dark (dark-ish) guy to "defend" himself
No ... we are saying, it is a FAR larger and far more disregarded story (after all, this one still entices): The story of black-on-black crime, and/or police shooting of black males. Throw in black males' extraordinarily high incarceration rates, and then you have the actual story no one wants to look at.
And that's a tragedy, because we accept its reality so thoroughly that we believe it is insoluble.
The Zimmerman story will have a satisfactory ending, however it is adjudicated, because the rule of law will prevail. Albeit with a hampered defense and all that the media circus entails.
Lisa, I think what Chief is saying is that the reason the media is putting it into the white-on-black-crime box is because that's a familiar box to them. They shy away from the fact that Zimmerman is Hispanic because the antagonism and racism between Hispanics and blacks is not something that white liberal Americans want to acknowledge or confront. Having to acknowledge that many Hispanics believe that all blacks are lazy criminals unwilling to work hard for a living(with some exceptions of course!)is something that makes their liberal "brown is good" reflex gag. So it goes.
Are you referring to the problem of police murder of unarmed black teens?
Then I agree, that is a problem. One part of a systemic feature of a colonial capitalist country such as America.
But that's another complicated post. I'm going to focus on what was wrong with the Zimmerman thing from the beginning.
This ordeal is almost an exact mirror of the Roderick Scott case here locally. A young male was also shot when he was up to no good. The difference? The victim was white and the perpetrator was black.
Did the coverage of that case hide the phenomena of white-on-white violence? Or was it simply a case of a man taking a life "in self-defense" as the price of swiping cheap cigarettes from a neighbors car (you can tell what I thought about the verdict)?
Moreover, sure Martin had some vague inklings of a petty criminal past. But it was Zimmerman who had no qualms of hurting other people when he didn't get his way; including a domestic assault on the woman he proposed to and taking swipes at a police officer.
Ironically, of course, had Zimmerman finished his studies at his Seminole college he might of actually become a police officer himself and maybe ended up summarily executing unarmed black teenagers when due process just got too tough, just like thug cops nationwide do every year without any fanfare.
Would that have been better for all involved?
BT,
Well, what we are hopefully discussing here is outside that box. Liberals can be very limited in what they choose to see, so we must careful about what we mouth, read and think.
Nikolay,
Amazing that Mr. Scott got off, um, scott-free. I feel pretty certain that if I shot a teen dead for breaking into my car I'd be facing some jail time (and I have had my car broken into, and have witnessed kids busting windshields on my street.)
I feel a pretty adversarial relationship with the police, personally, as though, if one has problem enough to call the cops, one is automatically lumped in with the scum and written off. As officers in the business have explained to me, that is a sad result of dealing with the dregs of society on a daily basis. Trust is not a big part of one's worldview.
The murder problem is certainly beyond any facile definition. We are simply suggesting -- using the gated community as metaphor and actuality -- that the barriers between chaos and safe zones are growing thinner.
What I meant, Lisa, is that this is a "story" more or less because it is a sort of ridiculous endmember of the very old, traditional "brother gets waxed by white dude because brother is scary" story. Scottsboro Boys, lynchings, that sort of thing, so it fits into the average moron's brain capacity. So in a sense, BadTux is right; it "works" because it's easily digested by a lazy public.
It also has everything tailor-made for the sort of thing that passes for "reporting" now; a simple-minded story that can be rendered in tropes that idiots can understand plus the "gotcha" effect of working against the whole "we're living in a post-racist America" theme so it seems contrarian.
As far as intra-community violence in black America, well...who gives a shit? Most of white America stopped giving a shit ten seconds after it became apparent after they wouldn't HAVE to live around or nearby scary Negroes, which is to say right after it became obvious that for all we were willing to end de jure segregation and economic indifference of blacks we wouldn't actually DO anything to ameliorate or reverse the effects of 200-plus years of them. So white was right and we were all OK with that...
Here's the thing; I'm not sure the word "liberal" means what you think it means. Last time I checked, it is defined as "Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry. Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded." I can't find anything in there that includes "doesn't believe that blacks/Hispanics can't be prejudiced". I played soccer with a whole bunch of vatos who had grown up everywhere from U.S. suburbs to Mexico City and for a lot of them you could have lit matches from their opinions of mallates.
I think the crucial difference is that most "liberals" think that shooting people for possessing Skittles and iced tea - whether while being black or otherwise - is a bad idea. Many conservatives I'm met seem to accept it as the legitimate cost of the Second Amendment.
Just sayin'...
"Many conservatives I'm met seem to accept it as the legitimate cost of the Second Amendment.
Come on, Chief. What about when the police shoot people, to use your libspeak, "just for having a cell phone"?
Do you honestly think that a repeal of the 2A would mean that LE would be disarmed as well?
Do liberals still think the judicial process, as laid out in the Constitution, is a good thing (Obama, King of Liberals, makes me think they do not)?
Because, if you answer "Yes", then how about waiting until after all the evidence is presented at trial before deciding why Trayvon was shot?
It is, you know, at least possible that he violently attacked Z, isn't it? And that the whole shot for skittle mantra is just more of that simple-minded story telling that can be rendered in tropes that idiots can understand .
So lemme get this straight. Trayvon hauled Zimmermann -- who outweighed Trayvon by over 100 pounds -- out of Zimmerman's car door then pummelled Zimmerman? Just tryin' to get my hand on how a kid could pull an obese grown man out of his car through a rolled-up window and locked door and start pummelling him.
Zimmerman chose to leave his car and approach a kid who was minding his own business. I know that if someone like Zimmerman left his car and started approaching *me*, I would justifiably be concerned that said person was intending no good, and would defend myself by any means possible if said person approached me in an aggressive and hostile way. But hey, I'm white, so what I'd do doesn't count...
FDChief, exactly. The framing of the issue as a "white-on-black" crime was for the benefit of lazy newsreaders and lazy newsviewers. The reality is closer to what Lisa said...
Also, as one who has shifted from liberal - thus understanding the mindset - to increasingly politically conservative, I'm going to call out liberals on playing ostrich on certain facts.
Fact is that "scary negro" on the street *is* more likely than a white dude on the street to be a violent criminal. Crime statistics back this up.
And life's a game of playing the odds properly.
All the PC thinking in the world doesn't change the facts.
I'm not quite sure why you didn't address my question of Zimmermann leaving the safety of his car to attack a black kid who was walking peaceably down the street, "no one". Other than the fact that you're a racist bigot and the question makes you look like a moron, but hey, I said "racist bigot", that implies the last anyhow...
-BT
"Zimmerman chose to leave his car and approach a kid who was minding his own business..."
BT, it is am assumption that he was minding his own business. What he was or wasn't doing isn't known. There is, apparently, some evidence that T was, indeed, acting as if he was casing properties for vandalism or break-ins.
Regardless you are making an assumption. More over, even if Z didn't have a good reason to follow T, T certainly didn't have a good reason to attack Z, if it turns out he did as alleged.
Again, there's a reason we have trials.
But why the reflexive siding with the black kid here? I notice that is the liberal's approach. Bending over backwards to side with the minority *even though the minority would never lift a finger to help the liberal white person*.
What is it? Collective guilt? Unconscious drinking of post modern PC flavored cool aid?
Who cares what color Trayvon was? I told you how I'd react to someone like Zimmermann exiting his car and approaching me in a hostile and beligerant manner, especially if I see that he is armed and thus running is unlikely to be successful (I can't outrun a bullet). I'm not black. I'm white. I'd react, if it was clear that I could not escape, most likely by attempting to disarm my attacker.
But racists have to cast everything into a white vs black thing, which is exactly the kind of thing that Lisa was pointing out -- and, furthermore, that I pointed out too in my own earlier messages. Zimmermann wasn't white, he was Hispanic. In the end, race was irrelevant here, what was relevant was that a wanna-be vigilante decided to be a "hero" and instead of waiting for the police to arrive, decided to exit the safety of his car and attack someone who was walking down the street that he viewed as "suspicious". Or at least I would have viewed it as an attack if Zimmermann had exited his car and started yelling at *me* while being clearly armed...
So tell me, if you were walking down the street and a 300 pound guy that you've never seen before exited his car with a gun stuck in his waistband exited his car and started yelling at *you* in a belligerant and hostile fashion, what would *you* think? That he was just wanting to say hi? Just curious...
BT, "I'm not quite sure why you didn't address my question of Zimmermann leaving the safety of his car to attack a black kid who was walking peaceably down the street..."
I am unaware that Z attacked anyone. Maybe it will come out in trial that he did. That certainly isn't the story Z tells.
I'm not a bigot. I just don't knee jerk side with the minority and I don't buy into the meme that modern day white people are responsible for minority failings or that we owe them anything.
I am not causing blacks to live in squalor, have multiple children out of wedlock, fail to learn to speak English properly, emulate gangster culture, etc. Neither are you or anyone else here.
"Who cares what color Trayvon was?"
Apparently a lot of people - Al Sharpton for one.
Had Trayvon been white, we would have never heard of him or the incident.
Oh yes...Obama for another
So are Sharpton and Obama racists?
I am unaware that Z's pistol was visible when the confrontation initiated.
"So tell me, if you were walking down the street and a 300 pound guy that you've never seen before exited his car with a gun stuck in his waistband exited his car and started yelling at *you* in a belligerant and hostile fashion, what would *you* think? That he was just wanting to say hi? Just curious..."
More of the story that I am not aware is substantiated by the facts. Z yelling at T? Says who?
Any how, if I was in that situation I would calmly ask Z what was on his mind. Staying calm is the key. I would, you know, talk to him; not assault him.
No one: Had Martin attacked anyone there would not have been a trial. If Zimmerman's attorneys had ANY proof whatsoever the DA would have simply refused to indict. You seem to be hepped up about police shootings so you know the drill; in my 15 years in Portland the only time we've EVER had a police shoot - including where the coppers shot people in the back - make it past the grand jury is where the evidence was SO overwhelming that there was no way to avoid it.
This trial will be a farce, but I'd be surprised if any solid evidence emerges that suggests that Zimmerman was anything but what he appears to be; an asshole with a weapon who went looking for trouble and found it.
no one: "But why the reflexive siding with the black kid here? I notice that is the liberal's approach. Bending over backwards to side with the minority *even though the minority would never lift a finger to help the liberal white person*.
What is it? Collective guilt? Unconscious drinking of post modern PC flavored cool aid?"
Because in this case the guy who was unarmed is dead and the guy who was running around playing the Jackie Chan role in Supercop shot him.
But it may surprise you to know that despite what the news media are all hyper about (which is what I WAS talking about if you'd bothered to actually read my comments) in this particular case I'm not convinced that racism per se was the big factor.
My personal suspicion is that this Zimmerman dude was just a fucking asshole, that particular species of asshole that thinks a magazine full of wadcutters gives him the biggest dick on the street and wants to swing it.
I think he saw a brother in a hoodie as someone he could swing that dick at and get away with it, and when the brother refused to get all cringy at the sight of Zimmy's big metal dick Zimmy busted a cap in his ass.
In a case like that the guy who gets capped has my sympathy, not the asshole who capped him. Simple as that. In this case, the dead guy is black and the asshole is hispanic, but my rule of thumb is; you an asshole?
Me no like you.
The framing of Zimmerman as obese, as shooting down a kid for holding Skittles, as being a white supremacist, and so on is classic media sensationalism.
The fact that the bell rings louder than ever after being so thoroughly debunked, indicates that too many folks had that frequency resonating in their head all along.
Of course, the media plays a lot of the public like a cheap fiddle.
"Had Martin attacked anyone there would not have been a trial. If Zimmerman's attorneys had ANY proof whatsoever the DA would have simply refused to indict."
Chief, there was not going to be a trial originally because there was nothing to try. The presecutor had declined to bring Z up on charges. The idea of a trial only popped into the prosecutor's head **after** the likes of Sharpton and Obama got involved. This is racism. This is blacks looking for pay back against whites. Whites buying into it is simply self hatred foolery at its most obvious and, quite frankly, simple minded.
"The fact that the bell rings louder than ever after being so thoroughly debunked, indicates that too many folks had that frequency resonating in their head all along."
Exactly. Thank you CholoAzul. This is racist minority groups sensing an outlet for their latent anger and hatred.
"My personal suspicion is that this Zimmerman dude was just a fucking asshole"
Yeah. That may well be the case. I lean towards that perception myself. But being an A hole is not a crime. Nor does it give someone the right to physically assault you.
To all,
Since this is RAW i'd like to point out as i always try to do the relevance of this micro incident.
We have a POTUS that does the same thing as Z did, and he does it every day of the week. As i understand it he has death panels weekly that pick out fore ordained missile kill strikes/ targets.
I don't think that Z planned his kill as does O.At least Z was protecting his home turf and not foreign locales.
O has made himself the gated community watch dog that kills with missiles.
If Z was wrong then so too is O.
If Z is a illegal killer then so too is O.
Why do we fail to see this and to discuss it?
When O killed al alwakis 16 y/o son how was that a righteous kill?.Ditto the Dad.
It's all too much for me. It's all rather a joke.
I have just 1 question on the Z/TM scenario. Don't gated communities have sign in sheets and controlled access? Where were the hired guards in this case?
Sorry for my late entry in this fray, but we've been doing medical care of Lisa's arm at the Mayo.
jim
Pt 1. Lisa, I hope your arm is A OK asap. Feel better.
Good points about O compared to Z, Jim.
I'm going to relate an incident that happened last night (100% true curious coincidence) that illustrates some of the points I tried to make here.
So my son (aka the Lt) is home from the wars and has been with us for about two months on the farm in our quiet, predominately white, rural community. In many ways it is like a gated community. Everyone knows everyone and while there may be squabbles, we do pull together to protect each other from outsiders. Outsiders are quickly identified.
It's a college town too and the college is the source of outsiders, but they mostly exist in their own bubble. They act like college kids and townies and students/prof.s have adapted a social system that promotes a harmonious, and to some extent symbiotic, existence.
The Lt has become a gentle soul and he is fitting right in. He's very popular, telling a lot of jokes, keeping everyone laughing, never causing trouble, being kind and considerate. These days he is a peace maker. He has had enough fighting to last a life time. He is sick to his soul over it. The locals respect his service at minimum and there's plenty who see him as a war hero and will buy him drinks and all of that.
Pt 2: Yesterday was his birthday and we went out for dinner and then he wanted to go down to Main St to the local pubs to have drinks with all of his new buddies. So we, my wife (the DD) and I and the Lt, went out on the town.
When the evening started the bar keep bought two shots of Jameson's for us. I proposed a toast that included something along the lines of how glad we are that he's with us for his B-day and, especially, not in Afghanistan or Iraq like the last two B-days.
Pt 3:
Well some Haji looking fucker a few seats down overheard this. For the next two hours my wife would tap me on the shoulder and motion towards haji (who was only drinking water). Haji was mad dogging the Lt. Just staring at him with a belligerent fixed gaze. Haji, it turns out, is some how associated with the college; middle eastern studies or some such.
Any how, at some point the Lt notices this haji's antagonism and walks over to talk to the guy. He extended his hand in a gesture of friendship and the haji declined to take his hand. The Lt shrugged and came back to us and decided right then and there to go to the pub next door. About an hour later haji shows up next door. He had some non-haji professor looking guy with him.
Again haji starts mad dogging the Lt. Again the Lt tries to diffuse the tension in an affable way. The haji says something in haji talk to my son and my son understood it, having worked with the ANA for nine months on a daily basis. The prof knew some haji too (like he was learning it and trying to show off his multiculturalism) and says something like,"You mean blah blah?" to the haji. Like he was trying to lessen the impact of what the haji said. But the haji held firm, coldly to the prof, "No. That's not it". Never breaking his stare on the Lt
So I'm standing there within arms reach now because the former lt definitely has ptsd going on. He wakes up in the middle of the night sweating and shaking. I found him sitting in the barn crying. He doesn't need this shit and I'm going to protect him.
So the Lt says to the haji, "say that again" the haji repeats whatever jibber jabber he had said before and the Lt says, "so you're calling ME the enemy" The haji did nothing to indicate that he had been misunderstood. The Lt started to escalate and I stepped in. But so did all of the townies in the joint. I stepped up to haji and the townies got between my back and the Lt, getting him out of the situation. Townies told me they had my back and do what needed to be done.
As an aside, that fucking haji just stood there eye ball fucking me with pure hatred and defiance. I told him in no uncertain terms that if he didn't get the hell out of the pub immediately (and never return) he was going to get hurt, badly. And I realized that that bearded camel fucking ass hole *wanted* to get hurt, wanted to be some kind of martyr. So I let him know that his would not be an ordinary ass kicking. That I would damage him ways from which he would never recover.
Come into our community and tell a soldier that he is the enemy. IN OUR OWN COMMUNITY!
and the ivory tower prof starts taking haji's side. One of our buddies let him know that he would get a beating too if he didn't shut his pie hole and exit the scene post haste. Typical fucking liberal America hating multiculturalist. Fuck the bunch of 'em.
So the liberal's self assured smirk disappeared as academics met reality and he encouraged his Taliban buddy out of the pub and, fortunately, no blood was shed.
So, there you have it, once again. 1.Gated communities are good. They are defense against scum bags. They still exist and are going strong in the form of small towns all across America.
2. Sometimes stereotypes of minorities are right on target and it's not racist to buy into them to some extent.
3. Minorities are often racists too. 4. Goofy liberals love racist minorities, even ones that consider them to be the enemy, just because they're, well, to goofy to call a spade a spade.
5. Many liberals are so fucking goofy that they will bend over backwards to try to befriend terrorists (witness Obama befriending crazy cannibalistic Islamic fundies in Syria).
Why is that haji even allowed in this country?
Pt 4 It occurs to me that it is possible I could have been another Z. That haji was a fraction of a hair from being damaged. Had the prof enabler not wised up and coaxed him out of there, I - and probably a few other people - would have demolished the guy.
And then what? You'd have a liberal media making a big noise over some poor innocent muslim being attacked by racist rednecks simply for being muslim. And you'd have the internet intelligencia riffing off that because that is the story the media loves to concoct and the public loves to hear.
You'd never hear the part about the haji's hatred of America and soldiers and his insults to both because MINORITY IS NEVER WRONG in the current US cultural environment.
Sure, Z is a minority, but with a small 'm' (white surname/light complexion). T is the more obvious Minority so the sympathy goes to him. Had T and Z both been black (capital 'M' minorities) then we would have never heard about the incident. Never.
It's all bullshit.
and what caused the friction here, IMO, was Chief and BadTux recognizing, on the one hand the role the media plays in creating this kind of BS "story" and shaping our perceptions, but then simultaneously buying into the media's version of events and, in their own minds, trying and finding Z guilty based on the media's white on black, Jim Crow story version of what went down.
The media is for idiots, but hey I'll go with it. That's what I read.
Nobody knows what happened that unfortunate night between Z and T. The facts will come out in trial; not in the media.
I ordinarily really enjoy Chief's style and appreciate his great knowledge of mil history. I also like what BT has to say most of the time. Even when I don't ultimately agree, I still respect the good points being made.
The comments on this thread, IMHO, were just too far into never never land for me.
Apologies though for any chapped hides.
no one,
fwiw i for one find it difficult to believe that any court could find Z guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
No witness so how can any one believe beyond a reasonable doubt that he killed in malice beyond his protection of his self?
There are a lot of questions on both sides, but bottom line is reasonable doubt. Or should i say beyond a RD?
Remember- the best way to survive a gun fight is not to get into one.
jim
Yep, following the trial while I work. Let's see, so far the prosecution's star witnesses have failed miserably. Saint Trayvon's female friend who was on the phone with him immediately before the shooting has testified that Trayvon referred to Zimmerman as a "crazy ass cracker". She has also proven to be an illiterate liar. The next witness, who saw the fight, is testifying that Trayvon was on top of Zimmerman beating him and smashing his head into the ground.
Z was a neighborhood watchman. It was his job to follow T. Beyond the following, we have T attacking Z and Z doing what he had to in order to defend himself. THAT IS WHY THIS CASE WAS NOT ORIGINALLY GOING TO TRIAL. The Obama admin., which forced a trial, is made to look foolish once again.
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