“What’s going on in
Florida?” (RE: Trayvon Martin …)
Someone asked me this the other day and wondered if Florida
was like the Wild West, with everyone armed and shooting each other for the
slightest provocation, while the police stand aside.
Florida has its faults, but it’s not the Wild West. Nor is anyone there allowed to just shoot
people for no apparent reason. But it’s
easy to see where this mistaken impression comes from.
The media has recently painted a picture of Florida as a
mecca for gun-toting vigilantes, with laws that seem to encourage people to
shoot first and ask questions later; a place where police look the other way
when a citizen guns down anybody, especially if the shooter is white and the
victim isn’t.
Sharpton, Jackson and others are now feeding this perception
with the Trayvon Martin incident. The
national media – who almost always paint the South generally as an ignorant
backwater of prejudice and intolerance – are eating it up. This is, of course, before all the facts of
that case are in.
Those of us from Florida or still living there are used to
see our state in the news for one outlandish thing or another. Whether it’s walking catfish, alligator
attacks, fundamentalists threatening to burn Qurans, old people plowing into
the front of a Dunkin’ Donuts, setting people on fire in Old Sparky, whatever,
we’re all kind of used to the media’s obsessions with everything strange in
Florida.
Now it’s Trayvon Martin.
The media love this one.
It’s got everything they want – the innocent, attractive black youth,
shot down in cold blood with no provocation by an overweight, gun-crazy, “town
watch” amateur run amuck, who may get off scot free because of some crazy law
only the NRA and their supporters could like.
And best of all, it happened in the South. The only thing better would be if the shooter
were lily white; unfortunately, the shooter is just Hispanic. But you can’t have everything.
Still, it’s enough of a platform to walk out every
politically-correct, race-baiting, gun-hating, and potential “setback in race
relations” sidebar. And need we (the
media) remind you, it happened in the South … but don’t worry; we’ll remind you
again, and again, and again. We’ll
probably even pull up some old footage from the civil rights era just so you
don’t forget. Remember black people being sprayed with
hoses, the shooting of Martin Luther King, Klansmen in the streets? How ‘bout we bring up the Civil War?
Oh the injustice. And see, it just continues with poor
Trayvon and too many people with guns, in the hands of racist rednecks, abetted
by NRA-backed laws that encourage this senseless carnage.
This is all without conclusive evidence of what really
happened that night. The only “fact” is
that Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmerman. That’s known.
The “why” and the specific circumstances surrounding this tragedy are
still conjecture.
But that hasn’t stopped the media and race-baiters from
convicting Zimmerman of the cold-blooded murder of Martin, simply because Martin
was black, in the court of public opinion.
That’s the storyline and they are not only sticking to it;
they continue to amp it up.
The only thing they’ve left
out is George Bush. But rest assured at
some point it will be his fault, too.
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