Six citizens drafted into Florida jury
duty have underscored the quirkiness of a justice system that counts among its
resources executions at San Quentin and forced feeding at Guantanamo. As of
2011 there were more than 2.6 million adults incarcerated in this country, and
another 4.8 million on probation or parole. The Florida jury has excused George
Zimmerman from being one of them.
It was right and proper, according to
the jury, for Zimmerman to stalk and then kill a 17-year-old African-American
boy on his way to the nearby home of his dad.
The jury heard all of the testimony
and reviewed all of the evidence in Zimmerman’s Sanford, Florida, trial. The
jury’s good faith and hard work are taken for granted. That doesn’t mean the
verdict is happily accepted by everyone.
There will be some exploitation of it
by anti-white individuals, some of whom are white, all pursuing a creeping fashion
of social robotics. Others will recognize that Zimmerman was prosecuted by
white attorneys, working within the system of government that enabled white
soldiers to fight for emancipation, white presidents to broaden and enforce
civil equality laws, white judges and legislators to support—if too slowly—the
ongoing extermination of official racism.
In a world populated by humans there
will still be prejudice, bigotry, favoritism and political nuttiness. But every
slip backward is accompanied by two or three steps forward.
Much of the world will see the
Zimmerman verdict as one of those slips backward.
Injustice anywhere is a
threat to justice everywhere.
We must learn to live together
as brothers or perish together as fools.
Know who
spoke those two sentences? Martin Luther King. Everyone remembers him. Now, few
will forget Trayvon Martin, who like those anonymous jurors has been drafted
into history.
