HE NOW BEARS THE MARK OF CAIN
(…to the end of his days..)

The jury’s verdict of – Not Guilty- was not a declaration of George Zimmerman’s innocence for the killing of Trayvon Martin. Far from it.

Leaving our emotional reactions aside about whether such a verdict was “just”, we realize that the jury simply followed the constraints put upon it by our system of law which, in this case, did not support the severity of the charges brought against him by the prosecution (perhaps an overreach due to background political pressures to do so). Failing to make that case for those charges, the prosecution left the jury with a sufficient margin of doubt to justify its verdict, abiding properly by the law.

Common sense, however, suggests such legalistic niceties don’t give us the full story behind this tragic case, which resulted in the unjustified death of a young man, and the ruination of another. Common sense further tells us that our society still has a long way to go to overcome those racial biases which still remain with us. While no longer as overt as these had once been, they are still latent, surfacing as they did here. Thus, George Zimmerman’s suspicions about Trayvon Martin may have arisen from an unconscious profiling of him because he was…a youth…wearing a hoodie…and Black…leading him on to make terribly erroneous assumptions about Trayvon Martin because of that.

This raises several questions here: First, would Zimmerman have made the same erroneous assumptions had Trayvon been..White? Second, was the presence of a young Black man in that gated community so uncommon as to raise suspicion? We’ll probably never know the answer to the first of these questions, but, the odds are…probably not. The answer to the second question, however, is problematic. The fact that Trayvon’s father lived in the community suggests it is not an all-white one, so, the presence of someone of color there not worthy of notice. All of which raises another question: Either Zimmerman was not familiar with that community, or, his latent biases overcame his common sense leading him to make such false assumptions.

It’s this convergence of false assumptions and ill-advised actions by both Zimmerman and Martin which led to the ultimate tragic results. For his part, Zimmerman ignored police advice not to leave his vehicle, and began trailing Trayvon on foot. Trayvon, for his part, after a panicky cell phone call to his mother, ignored her advice to continue walking as quickly as possible to his father’s place, turned and confronted Zimmerman in youthful anger, perhaps asking if he was one of those perverts who cruised for young boys, or some such comment, goading Zimmerman to respond in kind… thus moving both to physical violence. Cell phone recordings of those moments do little to clarify the situation and what happened next.

Which brings us to a final thought about this sorry event: How is it possible that an adult, armed, and with a weight advantage of at least fifty to sixty pounds, facing a teenager armed only with a bag of groceries, would be in such fear of his life he would feel compelled to draw and fire his weapon in supposed self-defense?

We’re left with no rational explanation for that, beyond these speculations, and, despite that jury’s verdict, George Zimmerman must now bear the mark of Cain…to the rest of his days.

CENTURION