It's Just Stuff

"Zimmerman should never have gotten out of his car."

 

I keep hearing this, day after day, from people outraged by the Zimmerman verdict. If he had just stayed inside his car like the police told him to (yeah, I know, they never did say that. Indeed, they asked him what Trayvon Martin was doing, which Zimmerman could only find out by getting out of his car and following him) and didn't have his gun in hand (yeah, I know, that never happened, either) and wasn't racially profiling Trayvon (seems more like he was criminally profiling, not racially) then Trayvon would be alive today, able to teach his brother how to fight, finally get that Glock he's got his eye on, and help the local economy by smoking even more marijuana.

Not get out of his car? What?

Used to be, your castle, your neighborhood was inviolate, as was your person and the persons around you; criminals were scum, the police served the lawful, the courts threw the book and everybody was an actual individual responsible for their behavior. Then Marx and Heidegger and Sarte and all the rest of them started all that giggly stuff about no truth and no God and no responsibility and it was all fun, you know, we can be hippies and smoke dope and free love and don't judge me, you square, you fascist. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

And now.

We are to cower inside some kind of fortified location whenever some misunderstood victim of the white patrimony displays his righteous anger by entering our property and liberating crass commercial products we bought with money illegally obtained by the exploitation of the proletariat. We are to place a call to the designated authorities, who will dispatch a properly trained and licensed official to detain the heroic member of the working classes while we wait and do nothing in the interim because, well, you have insurance, and life is too precious for you or the heroic representative of the oppressed underclass to become injured or gasp! be killed over something as unimportant as your stereo you're still trying to pay off and the diamonds you inherited from a great-grandmother. And if the police are delayed and the guy gets away with everything you own, well. It's just stuff. Get over it.

And should you, through your own inability to understand the subtleties and nuances of the rich cultures that give our country so much flavor and diversity, find yourself being pummeled into Jello by a righteously angry member of one of those said cultures (which have flourished despite your white patrimonic oppression), then you must gauge at what point the beating has changed from nothing more than a cultural expression ("whoop-ass") to an actual life-threatening event. But because your white racist thinking makes you incapable of judging that on your own, just endure it. You can later sue the poor misunderstood heroic member of the underclass, or your widow can.

Just stay in your car. Oppressor.

 

It Matters Now

Race, I mean. It didn't used to, at least, not to me. I grew up an Army brat, and practically every place I lived was a mini-UN, with whites and blacks and Asians and Latinos and some categories you never heard of running around. We all played with each other, we all hung out together. My Dad was a true-blue racist, as was my Mom on occasion, but it didn't take. While he railed against blacks and Chinese (in significantly egregious terms), I was with them down the street. All the things he said about them just wasn't my, or most of my peers, experience. Seemed to be generational: our Depression-era World War 2 veteran type parents were a lot of racists, while most of us, their kids, weren't. Familiarity breeds nonchalance.

But now?

I don't know the point in time where it changed, but I'm guessing the OJ Simpson trial. I mean, in the face of overwhelming evidence, he's acquitted? Because of non-specific racism against blacks at some point in history, and because no one likes the LAPD? Oh, c'mon!

Oh. C'mon.

Because if there is one thing that shows whites and blacks are universes apart in their understandings and concepts, it's that trial. I was utterly baffled by the verdict, but a black guy I knew, wasn't. He exulted. And I looked at him, speechless; two people were butchered, and it simply didn't matter, because some black guy was a slave 150 years before. Nicole Simpson died for our sins.

And since then: Hurricane Katrina, the Duke Lacrosse team, the Philadelphia Black Panthers, the Cambridge police acting stupidly (at least, according to the post-racial President), Don Imus...and now this Zimmerman trial.

I am baffled, again, by some of the things I've heard from blacks on the radio and TV: Zimmerman shouldn't have gotten out of his car, he shouldn't have followed, he just should have taken the beating...

What. The. Hell?

And there's no need to go into it, seek an explanation, understand it, because the problem is obvious: whites and blacks are universes apart. We don't even speak the same language. We are two distinct alien species with absolutely nothing in common. And I guess it's always been that way, regardless of my experiences when growing up.

That's sad. Really, really sad.