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"