I am sure Charles Pierce enjoyed writing this piece. It feels good to be an artist at the top of your craft, riffing on something that works and packs punch and tells truth to power. It’s powerful imagery that Mr. Pierce creates, with Zimmerman back on his old beat, armed and ready to take on all the fucking punks and assholes in true Charles Bronson style.
But Mr. Pierce misfired from the get-go, starting with his opening sentence.
However, in theory, at least, here is what is now possible.
What he means is that everything that follows is only “now” possible in light of the jury’s ruling in the Zimmerman case. That’s the wrong construction. It’s a misunderstanding. The Zimmerman trial jurors didn’t write any laws. They didn’t issue any judicial opinions. They didn’t create any actual legal precedent. They didn’t give anyone any authority to do anything. Blaming the jurors or even the result of the trial for anything that happens in the future is not an intelligent thing to do.
Mr. Pierce appropriately concluded his piece by quoting John Dos Passos: “All right we are two nations.” And Mr. Pierce placed himself squarely in one camp. He doesn’t want to hear the other camp. He doesn’t accept even an iota of validity in anything the other camp thinks. But the other camp thinks there are a lot of fucking punks and assholes in the world who do things like break into single mother’s homes, which warrants people like George Zimmerman setting up Neighborhood Watch programs, and warrants calling the cops when an unfamiliar black kid in a hoodie is walking around the neighborhood in the rain. They think it matters when black kids commit crimes and that it makes sense to profile black kids if those are the kids who have committed crimes in their neighborhood in the recent past.
The biggest scandal in this country right now is the way we just accept, as not even being newsworthy, the day-after-day drumbeat of black kids dying in our streets. But most of those dead black kids are being killed by other black kids. If you want to call them “assholes” or “fucking punks,” I guess you can take that attitude, but the vast bulk of “besieged” communities are black communities.
I can’t even catalogue all the causes of this crime and violence, but I know that when we aren’t indifferent to it, we tend to take actions that make it worse. People don’t want to talk about it, but one reason that Trayvon Martin is dead is because other black kids roughly his age committed crimes in The Retreat at Twin Lakes and inspired the Community Watch program. It is true that Trayvon’s only crime is that he looked like them, but the reason we can’t understand Zimmerman’s supporters is because we won’t acknowledge the inspiration for the Watch program.
I have already written about how the other side cannot hear us. They do not understand what it is like to be under suspicion just because of how you look. They don’t know what it is like to be treated as expendable by the police or the courts. They don’t see the human costs of racial profiling.
But, what Mr. Pierce misses is that this trial and this verdict didn’t create any new reality. It brought an existing reality into stark relief. Zimmerman got off because of pathologies that have developed in the system.
The people have supported laws that make it difficult to disprove self-defense. They’ve made it easier to get away with shooting someone. This case was lost because the law was heavily biased in Zimmerman’s favor. The trial didn’t create those conditions, they existed already.
What we need to do is to come up with a plan to stop the violence in our cities. Because everything flows from that.
Update [2013-7-16 11:10:35 by BooMan]: Here’s my response to Mr. Pierce’s response.
