"I still don't understand what Trayvon Martin was supposed to do."

The Crimson Reach has a suggestion:  don't punch a stranger on the street.  It's not necessary to run away.  Stand your ground, if you like.  Call 911 with that phone you've been chattering into all evening.  Just don't punch the stranger, straddle him, and pound his head into the pavement.  Almost anything but that, and your chances of surviving a human contact in Racist America are excellent.

Even if you suspect he's a gay man trolling for partners, and that makes you mad.

5 comments:

Grim said...

Walk to a public place, letting your friend know where you're going -- back to that store, maybe.

There's kind of an unknown here, too, though. We don't know when Zimmerman's gun became known to Martin. At that point, if you believe you are being followed by a rapist, a very aggressive attempt to secure the firearm becomes reasonable.

Assuming everything bad said about him is true, Martin was probably a lot like I was at that age. I didn't smoke dope, but I certainly drank alcohol before I was of legal age, and several fights were had; even some of the worse stories about him have certain resonances with my own teenage years.

So I have some sympathy for him. For Zimmerman, too. When we lived in Savannah we had a neighborhood that was starting to go bad after having long been a pleasant place to live. Some undesirables moved in, we began to see people passed out in their cars on drugs, fights began to break out in people's homes that were severe enough to shake the windows visibly from outside. I even called the police once, which is absolutely against my religion, but the woman inside the apartment sounded like she might really be in danger if things didn't get calmed down.

We used to patrol the neighborhood every night, my wife and I, just to make sure people knew we were watching and we weren't going to let things slide without resistance. And yes, we carried guns doing it, because the undesirable newcomers were beginning to look more and more like gangbangers. And yes, like Zimmerman, I went over to a woman's house once and installed a deadbolt for her because she'd had an encounter that scared her. It wasn't as dramatic as the one in this case -- just a deranged homeless person -- but I understand the perspective of the guy who wants to hold the line.

I can really see both sides of this case. To me it looks like a pure tragedy, the Greek kind of tragedy. What happens in the Greek tragedies is that everyone is doing the right thing, given their position and their family relationships and their particular duties. It's the conflicts between those things that produce the tragedy. Martin didn't necessarily do anything wrong; we don't know, and can't know. Zimmerman didn't necessarily do anything wrong either. This is very plausibly a tragedy, not a crime.

It's a bad world, as an old Australian friend of mine used to say.

E Hines said...

Walk to a public place, letting your friend know where you're going....

He already was in a public place. Perhaps move to a place with more people--witnesses--in it. And rather than break an existing contact with a friend to attempt contact with the police, as CR suggested, ask that friend to call 911.

We don't know when Zimmerman's gun became known to Martin.

We do know Zimmerman's version of that: after Martin had mounted and been pounding away. In Zimmerman's struggles (squirms) to at least get off the sidewalk, his pistol became exposed, and the struggle for the piece ensued, with Martin having the initial advantage. How Zimmerman won that struggle I don't know (though I don't dispute the possibility that he did).

But Martin had no obligation to be anywhere but where he was prior to the fight, and Zimmerman had no obligation to do anything differently than what he did prior to the fight.

As you say, a tragedy of a certain sort.

Eric Hines

Texan99 said...

If Zimmerman should have stayed in his car, should Martin have stayed in his apartment?

I can't get very far with that approach.

douglas said...

You know, Grim, when you relate your recollections of being that age, I'm reminded that most guys know quite well how 17 year old young men sometimes do foolish things, and violently, because we were there once ourselves. I'm not sure most women get that (perhaps why the jury was all women- prosecution thought that they'd not understand so easily that a 17 year old isn't a 'child'?).

douglas said...

Oh, and the answer to the title question is, in the four minutes he had to go home before he and Zimmerman crossed paths again, take 90 seconds to go home. Pretty simple, and that he didn't doesn't leave a lot of options that he was innocently 'just walking home'.