Stand Your Ground

Trayvon Martin

If you are stalking me with a gun, I will feel threatened. If I feel threatened, I have the right in 23 states to stand my ground and to use deadly force against you. When you realize I intend to use deadly force against you to protect myself, you will feel threatened, too. Will you then have the right to stand YOUR ground and use deadly force against me, your victim? And if you, the instigator, have a gun and I don't, you will win, and I, the victim, will end up dead. Will you go free on grounds of self-defense under the Stand Your Ground law? In other words, if you try to murder me and I fight back, will your act of murder suddenly become an act of self-defense? This is madness.

Could this be what happened to Trayvon Martin? The 17-year-old African American male was being stalked by a man with a gun. He must have felt threatened. Somehow there was a confrontation between the two, but we don't know if Zimmerman confronted the young man he found so strange and threatening or if Trayvon confronted his stalker. But the man had a gun and Trayvon had Skittles, so Trayvon ended up dead. Now the stalker, George Zimmerman, claims that he felt threatened because Trayvon confronted him. Even though Zimmerman was the aggressor, he can apparently claim innocence under the Stand Your Ground Law.

But if this is what happened, Trayvon was only exercising his rights under the Stand Your Ground Law. You might say he had a right to kill Zimmerman. But think about it. Since he had a right to kill Zimmerman, under that insane law Zimmerman has a right to kill him back. But Martin had a right to kill Zimmerman because Zimmerman was threatening Martin because Martin was threatening Zimmerman because Zimmerman was...Wait. This is circular reasoning. This is absurd. This is ridiculous.

It was better when nobody had the right to kill anybody.

This is nothing but incitement to vigilantism, creating a dog eat dog world. This law was brought to us in North Carolina, Florida, and 21 other states by ALEC and the NRA. Jeb Bush signed the bill into law in Florida with an NRA official standing by his side for the photo op.

Now the Right Wing Hate Machine is busy spinning away slandering the dead child. It's okay that Trayvon was murdered because his tweets on Twitter aren't up to snuff. It's okay that Zimmerman shot him dead because he was suspended from school for having an "empty marijuana bag." I heard he even wrote the letters "WTF" on his locker at school. That's certainly grounds for capital punishment with no jury and no judge and no attorney and no court and no constitution. What does any of this have to do with making it okay for Zimmerman to murder Martin? And why is Zimmerman a hero to some lost souls for killing Trayvon?

And none of these facts can tell us that Trayvon was the instigator because we have all heard the tapes. We know that Zimmerman hunted Martin down with his gun. What we don't know is whether he caught him and if he did, what ensued. But does it matter? Does it matter if Trayvon fought back? I think not. Surely not. It may have reached a point at which Zimmerman felt he had to kill or be killed, but wouldn't he have put himself in that position by stalking Martin with a gun? Didn't Trayvon have a right to STAND HIS GROUND?

There is no circumstance under which it is okay for an armed adult to shoot dead an unarmed child.

Speaking of the tapes, we hear the police tell Zimmerman to stop following Trayvon Martin, and we know he did not stop. We hear Zimmerman say what sounds like, "[Expletive] coon." But one of his friends is all over TV explaining that "this is the difference between a 'c' and a 'g.'" He says it's "GOON." And he says that's a term of endearment. Yeah right, you can tell from Zimmerman's tone of voice and stalking actions how endeared Trayvon was to him.

I spent years teaching high school in predominately black schools. After obtaining my Ph.D. in Linguistics I taught in the English Department at Howard University in Washington, D.C. I lived in a racially mixed neighborhood on Capital Hill in the SE section of Washington. I have heard countless stories told by the victims of profiling and harassment by police officers. My young African American male students told me of having been stopped for driving too nice a car or being in a nice neighborhood, even if it was the neighborhood where they actually lived. I loved my students and my heart was broken by the hardships I saw them endure for for driving while black, walking while black, breathing while black, being while black.

President Obama implicitly acknowledged this whole package when he stated the other day that if he had a son, the son would look like Trayvon. Meaning he would have to have had THE TALK with him. The talk about holding your tongue with police, no matter what they say, acting respectful, no matter what they do, making no sudden moves, just trying to stay alive in any encounter. And now it isn't just the police. It's Neighborhood Watch volunteers. It's anybody. It's everybody.

It's open season.

And of course President Obama was attacked by the meanest spirits of the Right Wing, including Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich. This was so obviously ugly and unfair that I won't even take it on. You know, even those of you who say you don't. You do. You know.

It is so clear to me that Zimmerman should be charged with murder. I am not saying he should be convicted. He has a right to a fair trial and to be proved guilty beyond reasonable doubt. But he should be sitting in jail right now. I hear there have been death threats against him. I can't say I'm sorry. I hope he never gets a good night's sleep the rest of his life.

A law that give me the right to kill you, which then gives you the right to kill me is insane. Maybe America has gone completely, not just partially, insane. As the play from the Sixties said, "Stop the world, I want to get off."

                                         Phil Ochs "Too Many Martyrs"

UNC-Chapel Hill

It's March 18. This afternoon at 5:15, my Alma Mater UNC meets Creighton in the NCAA March Madness basketball championship tournament. Even President Obama has picked Carolina to win the whole thing, knock on wood. I've seen them win it all so many times. I go back to the prime of Coach Dean Smith, when it seems we always made the Final Four, winning the title quite often.

I spent so many years of my life in Chapel Hill for one reason or another that it will always feel like home to me. Just going there was such a treat when I was in high school. We would go down to visit Morehead Planetarium and Science Center, one of oldest and largest institutions of its kind and one that was used to train Gemini and Apollo astronauts in celestial navigation.

Morehead Planetarium and Science Center

Chapel Hill was always the center of a liberal oasis in a Red State Right Wing desert. Jesse Helms, in the days before he was in the Senate, used to spew an editorial on Channel 5 in Raleigh, and he often railed about the Communists down the road in Chapel Hill. The state zoo, which is quite nice, is in Asheboro, but Helms once said we didn't need a zoo. Just put a fence around Chapel Hill, he said. Then we'd have a zoo. Chapel Hill elected Howard Lee, an African American, mayor in the early seventies. The town and the campus were always ahead of the times. It was refreshing just to be there.

Here's the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Wilson Library. When I first went to Chapel Hill, this was the most important library on campus. There was a newer Undergraduate library, but Wilson was the Graduate Library, the place for serious research. When I first visited the Harvard campus and saw Widener library, I thought of Wilson. As a "public ivy," Carolina made its research libraries comparable to those in the Ivy League. (Before the cutters and levelers came through in the 80s and 90s and now again, creating mediocrity wherever they can. The library has had books stay in the shipping boxes, uncatalogued and unavailable to students because of personnel cuts, but no one with power cared.)

Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill

I worked at Wilson while my then husband was in medical school, in the periodicals division and got more education than I had in any classroom. I've had many lunches with my friends on that stone wall in front, happily running back up those steps into the lobby of a library that LOOKED like a library, like a miniature Library of Congress, complete with dome. Later, when I was in grad school, the linguistics department was in the first building to the right of Wilson, Dey Hall, sitting at a 90 degree angle, making a corner of the campus quad. Before I finished my Ph.D., a new graduate library was built, a modern building, no longer in the center of campus, and Wilson began to be used for other purposes. But it will always be what a library is supposed to be to me.

The Bell Tower is another campus landmark. The Patterson-Morehead Bell Tower has been ringing in each hour of the day since 1931. The landscaping around the Tower is breathtaking and was designed by William C. Coker of the Botany department. There is a Bell Tower parking lot that I was lucky enough to find space in back in the Seventies when I worked across the street at the library. These days you park in a satellite lot and take a bus in to the central campus or get your daily exercise hiking in. Chapel Hill's village character is lost, but I still love it anyway. The Bell Tower stands next to the football stadium between the academic campus and the health sciences campus. And there's a spot on the quad where you can stand from which the top of the tower looks just like a dunce cap on the dome of the library. Legend has it that this came out of a rivalry between the men who founded the buildings.

The Bell Tower

Most post cards of Carolina seem to show the Old Well, the symbol of the campus, which is always surrounded by the most beautiful landscaping. The Old Well stand near Old East, the oldest building on campus. For many years the well was the source of water to the first dorms, Old East and Old West. Its shelter and landscaping were added in stages and now there is a drinking fountain many believe brings good luck. And there's a huge, beautiful arboretum on campus. Carolina's picturesque quadrangle makes it one of the most beautiful campuses in the country, full of trees, grass, flowers, and stone walls and brick walkways, and little mini-quads filled with flowers that sit behind the first row of buildings facing the main quadrangle. Across Franklin Street from campus is the small village-like downtown, full of bars, restaurants, and shops. There used to be the best bookstore ever downtown, the Intimate Bookshop, with wood floors that creaked loudly and books stacked and crammed everywhere, but it moved to the mall a long time ago after a fire, and I think it eventually closed altogether.

The Old Well

at the Arboretum

one of the mini-quads off the main quad 

Many restaurants come and go, but some become traditions. Off Franklin Street, down Amber Alley, way below downtown, there was an artisan's shop for handmade jewelry next to the classic Rathskellar, which has been a landmark for generations. The restaurant had many rooms, one of which was the cave room, pictured here in days gone by. See the German Shepherd? The Rat, a favorite with alumni, was scheduled to reopen last year, after being closed for several years. I've even taken my mother there. I love it. There's Crooks Corner, gourmet Southern restaurant, specialty: shrimp and grits, which was raved about by the late Craig Claiborne, food critic for the NY Times.  Claiborne also enjoyed a little place on Rosemary Street, Mama Dips Country Kitchen, for the best breakfast in town. Dean Smith said that Chapel Hill couldn't be the Southern Part of Heaven without Mama Dip, who began her restaurant in 1976. My favorite bar was always He's Not Here. They had Pac Man and no waiters.

The Rathskellar's Cave Room back in the day

Mama Dip's

He's Not Here

The Quad as seen from Wilson Library

Chapel Hill. I worked there, I played there, I studied there. I loved there, I lost love there. I got my heart broken in Chapel Hill, broken into little pieces. But I learned so much that I realized I didn't know much compared to what there is to know. I learned that one lifetime is not enough to learn much at all. I learned to love learning. I learned to teach. I developed habits of reading and learning and reasoning that I keep to even this day over forty years after I first moved there. You can buy watches and clocks that sing, "I'm a Tarheel born and a Tarheel bred, And when I die I'll be a Tarheel dead." That's me.

Go Heels!

The little village of Chapel Hill.

Brown's Thoughts of Death

Sterling A. Brown


Thoughts of Death


Thoughts of death
Crowd over my happiness
Like dark clouds
Over the silver sickle of the moon

      Death comes to some
      Like a grizzled gangster
      Clubbing in the night;
      To some
      Like an obstinate captain
      Steadily besieging barriers;
      To some like a brown adder
      Lurking in violet-speckled underbrush;
      To some
      Like a gentle nurse
      Taking their toys and stroking their hot brows.

      Death will come to you, I think,
      Like an old shrewd gardener
      Culling his rarest blossom . . . .

Sterling A. Brown, The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, ed. Michael S. Harper, HarperCollins Publishers, 1980.

Anniversary of Bloody Sunday, 1965

On this day in 1965, more than 600 people walked toward the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, planning to march across to Montgomery on the other side. Before they reached the bridge they were met by local police and state troopers. 


When the 600 civil rights marchers refused to turn back, they were tear-gassed. People were brutally beaten by officers with billy clubs. Fifty people required hospitalization. They didn't make it across. This day has come to called Bloody Sunday. 


Soon, however, a court ruled that they were entitled to federal protection. On March 21, the march from Selma to Montgomery was successfully completed, five months before the Voting Rights Act would pass. 


These brave souls helped change America 47 years ago today.

Peaceful protesters beaten, manhandled.

What a terrible intimidating sight.

Paradise Lost

Those of us who fought the battles of Women's Liberation forty years ago have gotten older. We who fought for the Equal Rights Amendment, which we never got, are reaching retirement age. But that does not mean we can rest. The freedom of our daughters and granddaughters is being threatened as though the last 40 years never happened. We must snap to attention, head back to the battle lines and fight again for the women coming behind us. Freedom isn't freedom if it doesn't last.