#HeIsNotASuspect

[calimary]

18. No kidding.

Sacrificing our precious kids and teens on the altar of some lummox's paranoia and cowardice and the need to be Rambo. Or vermin like Zimbo. VERMIN. I'm a 60-year-old white woman, and a mom. I'm still just heartsick.

I don't know what upsets me more. Is it the loss, the stupid sheer waste of the murder of young, innocent, unarmed Trayvon Martin, or is it the number of knuckledraggers who think Zimbo did just fine, thank you, and that somehow, Trayvon Martin was the perpetrator and Zimbo the poor, poor, put-upon, threatened, endangered victim.

Or is it what you start feeling when you stop for a moment and try to wrap your brain around the statistics, how MANY young blacks, mainly male, who are judged, found guilty, in such an arbitrary and stupidly-prejudiced manner, and executed by unilateral vigilante schmucks? Or is it when you think how up against it the black community is here in America - how so many of them are marginalized and presumed guilty til proven innocent, with how broad a brush they're painted and their "image" is tarnished and they're not even considered as individual human beings of individual worth and merit. How MANY of them wind up arrested, jailed, left to rot in prison for "offenses" for which a white kid would barely get a hand slapped.

It's just so infuriating, embarrassing, disgusting, discouraging, shocking, disappointing, I've been in deep dismay ALL WEEK.

I think I'm also upset because of my own naivete. I was so sure the first election of Barack Obama to the presidency meant a huge leap forward in our battered and wrong-headed nation's history. That election night, I was just so happy! Thrilled! We'd come SOOOOO far as a nation. We'd come through all of the shit. And out the other side, into the light of broad-mindedness, tolerance, enlightenment. We'd grown up and weren't quite the spoiled snot-nosed imperious, demanding adolescent in the community of nations where the others were all adult-age, and had been through wars, famines, bombings, invasions, and sometimes THOUSANDS of years of history and culture. And we were growing up as a nation to take our place in the community of nations at its most mature. We HAD gotten over it. We HAD gotten the better of our baser urges that embraced the KKK and segregation and slavery and Jim Crow. We'd gotten beyond it, finally! This was a notice sent out to the whole world - America's officially and formally beyond all that. We outgrew our pig-headed childishness.

And MAN was I wrong. The reality of Barack Obama as PRESIDENT, in the Oval Office because he won the right to sit behind the historic Resolute Desk and do business, instead of the janitor-in-chief or White House chef or usher or errand-runner. Seems as though as that reality sank in, it only brought out the worst in too many Americans - those who resolutely cling to the worst of our nature, and just were not having any of this. I think that's what brought the teabaggers into existence. The moment it dawned on them that their worst fears were realized. There was a black guy in the Oval Office and he wasn't the janitor (which is how it's supposed to be!).

It's just fucking embarrassing. And SO discouraging. DAMN IT! We're BETTER than this!!!! Or at least I thought we were. I thought we had proof of it, starting in November 2008. I'm ashamed of my country - and my countrymen and women who insist on keeping their hearts on ice and their heads up inside their sphincters. No wonder their compassion is in the deep freeze and all they see is shit.