Pawkeshup, Averter of the Apocalypse wrote:
And? There was a crime problem in the neighborhood. Zimmerman didn't "take it on himself to patrol the neighborhood", the HOA had a series of meetings where the problems with break ins were discussed and decided to start up a neighborhood watch program, and Zimmerman volunteered to be part of it. It's not like he was doing this all on his own or anything. Zimmerman's "history of aggression" is subject to debate, but also something that Martin could not possibly have known merely by looking at him sitting in his car.
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You just went to a store, you know, a place in which you exchange a form of currency for goods. You are walking home, you know, without having a large collection of plastics and metals surrounding you and propelling you forward. Then you notice that there is such a contraption slowly rolling up behind you, or near enough to you.
Except that's not what happened. Would people please stop repeating this utterly false rumor created in the first weeks of this thing before the facts were known? At no point did Zimmerman follow Martin in his car. Zimmerman was
parked in his car while Martin walked towards him.
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You attempt to ascertain the identity of the driver, and you discover that it is the local unstable leader of the neighbourhood watch. Are you (A) going to strike up a jaunty conversation about the poor weather (B) going to turn around and walk away slowly or (C) run and hide because you are uncertain as to why or how long this particular nutbar has been following you.
Martin certainly did not know who Zimmerman was, just as Zimmerman didn't know who Martin was. Ergo, if we're going to use that logic you spoke of, we can't make assumptions about what Martin was thinking based on information about Zimmerman. All he saw was a guy sitting in a
parked car, looking at him, and talking on his cell phone.
So let's replay the scenario. You're walking back from the store. You've done nothing wrong, are doing nothing wrong, and have done nothing that anyone might think is odd or suspicious at all. As you're walking in this perfectly normal manner towards your home, you notice someone sitting in a parked car on the side of the road. You notice that he's already seen you (cause you're walking in the street, and he's sitting in a parked car), and is talking on his phone. What do you do?
A. Continue walking home as normal?
B. Flee from this person in the car?
A, right? I mean, there's no reason to do anything else. Why would you run? No reason at all. But Martin did run. He ran from someone he had only seen moments earlier, and who had done nothing more than see Martin walk down the street and talk on his cell phone. We can certainly speculate that Zimmerman did something else to make the perfectly normal Martin flee, but we have an audio recording of the whole thing, and there's nothing on the recording to indicate that Zimmerman did anything other than sit in his car up to that point. So that speculation, while possible, is highly improbable. That leaves us to speculate about what other reasons Martin might have for fleeing, and we have one really obvious one: The entire reason for the phone call was that Zimmerman thought Martin was acting strangely. If we accept that this is true, then certainly Martin would have realized that his behavior would look strange/suspicious to someone else. Thus, it makes a hell of a lot of sense that he would assume that Zimmerman had seen him, thought what he was doing was strange, and was on the phone with the cops.
Given that that's exactly what Zimmerman was doing, it can't be that unreasonable to speculate that Martin was able to noodle this out, right? Your speculation requires huge leaps in logic which aren't supported by fact. Mine only requires that we're able to assume that Martin could figure out what Zimmerman was actually doing sitting there in his car talking on the phone. I don't think that's unreasonable at all.
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Now, I'm not saying Martin chose the best option. But Zimmerman most certainly chose the utterly worst one.
Huh? Up to the point in time that Martin ran from Zimmerman, all he'd done was sit in his car, observe someone walking down the street, and call the police. Which is
exactly what he was supposed to do Quote:
Had he contained his hatred for "these @#%^s", sat in his truck like a good little boy, then we wouldn't be discussing any of this. Instead, a boy is dead, a murderer is free, and you're posting a novel in 200 posts.
What hatred? You're injecting your own assumptions into this. And you've also skipped the key question here. We're talking about why Martin ran. Martin ran
before Zimmerman got out of his vehicle. Thus, whether he should have gotten out of his truck is completely irrelevant to that question. I'm asking why Martin ran. And my speculation is that he ran because he realized that what he'd been doing looked suspicious, and that someone had seen him doing it and had called the cops. The reason I brought this entire aspect up was to observe that perhaps by teaching young black men to fear the police and authority, we're creating the very problem that caused this tragic death.
If my speculation is correct, than Martin's death was the direct result of his own fears of police/authority. Had he not reacted as he did to a man sitting in a parked car talking on a cell phone the way he did, he would be alive today. But he (and many young black men) have been indoctrinated into a culture of fear and distrust of the law and police. This unfortunately leads many young black men to make incredibly poor choices when confronted with these sorts of situations, often escalating them in ways that cause ridiculously out of proportion negative outcomes (almost always for the young black man). I'm arguing that we should *not* be responding to this case by reinforcing that fear, but that's exactly what many are doing. And the result of this will be yet more black men in prison or graves because we're unwilling or unable to be honest about what's actually causing the problem.
