Old Views (With One New Twist)
03/27/2012
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My view of the Trayvon Martin tragedy is that A) Messed up stuff like this happens all the time all across the country, like in a parking lot a few miles from me when an officer of the Obama Administrationshot an 18-year-old violist, with media reaction barely above crickets chirping; B) There was no need to hurry to arrest Zimmerman since he wasn't a flight risk, and has, indeed, only made himself scarce lately due to his reasonable fear of being murdered by some hothead enraged by the Respectable Media. C) This doesn't mean that Zimmerman shouldn't eventually be charged with something once all the facts are available. Or, D) then again, maybe not. I don't know all the facts and I don't know all the laws.

The more general issue is that this giant Prestige Press Hatefest is part of their ever ongoing War on Knowledge. Zimmerman is being accused of the hate crime of Noticing Patterns: that the main criminal threat to his community are young male blacks. Now, nobody has any problem with him being ageist and sexist when doing his community watch. No, his unforgivable fault is that, presumably, like everybody else, Zimmerman was no doubt aware of the racial pattern in crime. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

Here's something that we'll likely never know, but that would turn everybody's brains inside out if it happened to emerge: What if (and this is purely hypothetical) poor Trayvon Martin's thinking was: "Who is this guy following me? If he was a white guy, I'd figure he's just a neighborhood do-gooder so I don't have much to worry about. But he doesn't look white, he looks like some kind of drug-dealing Latin, and everybody knows in Florida that they're often gangsters. Didn't you see Scarface? So I'd better get the drop on him and punch Scarface here out before he tries to rob me or kill me for stepping on his drug-dealing turf."

Or, what if Trayvon's uncle liked to lecture him on how oppressive Hispanic cops had caused the 1982 and 1988 Miami riots by abusing African-Americans, and we shouldn't let the Hispanics push us around anymore and act like they own Florida.

As I said, we'll never know, but for the sake of cognitive exercise, assume that a heretofore unknown text message from Trayvon to a friend is discovered saying more or less that his fear of Zimmerman and motivation for confronting him was motivated by his prejudice against mestizos.

Your assignment: In three mental chess moves or less, prove that this would still be All the White Man's Fault.

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