Maybe the world is worse than it used to be. Stay where you don’t look Out Of Place to George Zimmerman, and you’ll be safe. Nice people don’t have racism, these days. You stab and stab at the shadowy Beast and discover it is nothing but a scared boy running along the beach. You can’t go on the Internet and talk to strangers beause the People You Don’t Know are Bad and Dangerous. You can’t ride a bicycle without a helmet. Every possibility ended with those frightened pleas and the gunshot. We don’t know what might have become of Trayvon. Hope can cast shadows as massive and false as those cast by fear. “ He could have been president,” one commentator noted. This is not quite fair to their memory either, but it is the debt we owe the dead.ĭead children, dead kids, often carry with them the burden of our outsize hopes. Tom Wolfe, more cynical than I, notes in “The Bonfire of the Vanities” that every kid who dies unjustly and too early retroactively transforms into an honor student with presidential aspirations. He got A’s and B’s and was majoring, said his teacher, in cheerfulness. He wanted to be an engineer, the stories report. His name was Trayvon Martin, “Slimm” or “Tray” to his friends. To Zimmerman, the figure in the hoodie was a nameless, faceless menace. If my fear is big enough, it can outweigh your life. What the law says is that force is justified if someone “reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm.” In a word - fear. We’re more frightened of public speaking than drowning, of spiders than driving. You need a real and reasonable fear that your life is in danger.īut so few fears are. All you need prove is that you were very, very afraid. To get away with murder, you need not prove that anyone intended you harm before you shot him. He pursued, shot and killed Trayvon.įortunately for the fearful, Florida’s “ Stand Your Ground” law has their interests at heart. Instead, Zimmerman was, by his own account, terrified. George Zimmerman must have been terrifying - larger, older, carrying a weapon. Trayvon Martin was 17 and looked younger. Fear that what you don’t know will hurt you. It’s the fear that makes you appoint yourself neighborhood watchman in the first place, to make sure nothing Out Of Place shows up. Fear in the call that George Zimmerman, self-appointed neighborhood watchman, placed to the 911 dispatcher about a suspicious figure in his gated community “looking about.”įear in the phone conversation Trayvon had at the same time with his girlfriend, saying that there was a man following him and that he’d put his hoodie on.įear in the agonized pleas recorded in a neighbor’s 911 call as the two struggled.įear of the nameless, faceless menace of the You-Shouldn’t-Be-Here. You could smell it all over the story of Trayvon Martin.
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